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And now MacDonough's wisdom in choice of the navy yard was seen, for a British squadron was sent to destroy his infant fleet, or at least sink stone-boats across the exit so as to bottle it up. But their attempts were baffled by the batteries which the far-seeing American had placed at the river's mouth.
Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who had desired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an old shoal which you would not remember." "We are not ALL jackals here," said the Adjutant. "Was it the shoal made where the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth a long shoal that lasted three floods?" "There were two," said the Mugger; "an upper and a lower shoal."
Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness. They are all children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope and patch.
There was a shriek above the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line. "Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do.
O sons of unthinkable begetting children of unspeakable shame are we here for the look of the thing?" It was two feet of wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders as Peroo leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of the sea. Findlayson was more troubled for the stone-boats than anything else.
He took no count of time, for the river was marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the full note of a flood.
It fell to his lot to make the sleds, the stone-boats, the hay-rigging, the ax helves, the flails, to mend the cradles and rakes, to build the haystacks, and once, I remember, he rebuilt the churning machine. He was slow but he hewed exactly to the line.
He made an abrupt movement as he recognized her, but his eyes shone with satisfaction. "I suppose you are going for some peat," she said. Kit said he was, and added that Peter and two or three neighbors were loading the stone-boats on the moor. "Then, I wonder whether you could let me have a small quantity when you come down?" "You can have a load if you want." Grace laughed.
Bad. He might have saved the last word. Well, we don't want to know any more. We've got to work the gangs all night and clean up the river-bed. You'll take the east bank and work out to meet me in the middle. Get every thing that floats below the bridge: we shall have quite enough rivercraft coming down adrift anyhow, without letting the stone-boats ram the piers.
Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels. "A tree hit them. They will all go," cried Peroo. "The main hawser has parted. What does the Sahib do?" An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's mind.
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