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Updated: May 14, 2025
I maintained a stubborn indifference, my pistol still in my hand, my teeth shut in the defiance of them, until we reached the great craft, and joined Black upon the gallery. There, the man John explained that I had stood between him and his purpose of hanging the skipper of the Bellonic; indeed, with such warmth and anger, that I thought my end had come upon the spot.
Black went out as usual early in the morning; his object being, as on the preceding day, to find out, if he could, what the Admiralty were doing in view of the robbery of the Bellonic; and Osbart, refusing to get up to breakfast, lay in bed reading the morning papers. We had been left thus about the space of an hour when there came a telegram for the doctor, who read it with a fierce exclamation.
"Do you make a business of killing children?" I cried again, and pointed to the dead body of the girl-child. I don't know who was more surprised, the captain of the Bellonic, listening, or the man John. "You cub," he cried; "if you talk to me I'll skin you alive!" But I said quickly "Gentlemen, these men want every shilling on this ship.
Seven of us at last stood on the bridge, and were face to face with the captain of the Bellonic, and four of his officers. I have said that I feared the terrors of that deck, but the reality surpassed the conception. It was a very babel of sounds, of groans, of weeping. The ship's surgeon himself seemed paralysed before the sight of the carnage around him.
At the sight of us he jumped to his feet, and shrieked "Murderers!" so continuously that the echo of his cry rang in my ears that day and for many days. Meanwhile another scene was passing on the bridge between the man John and the captain of the Bellonic.
On the second day after the robbery of the Bellonic, we stopped a third ship; though I saw nothing of it, as all the fighting was on the starboard side, and my cabin was to port; but there was a sharp fight on the third morning with a Cape-bound vessel, and again towards the afternoon with one of the North-German Lloyd boats homeward bound to Bremerhaven: as before, Osbart, coming to my rooms, delighted to give me the details of the captures; and that night he was unusually frivolous.
The machine-guns upon our decks were already cleared; the men were stripped, ready for the fray, as tigers for their food. Indeed, before I quite understood the purport of the manoeuvre, we were passing the Bellonic at a distance of not more than fifty yards; and at that moment it seemed as if all the furies of hell were let loose upon our decks.
I had begun to ask myself when the work would be done, for the liner went at a tremendous pace and was rapidly leaving us, when I got my answer with the crash of the great gun forward, and the sight of a shell ploughing the sea fifty yards ahead of the Bellonic.
Detective-Inspector King went as he had come, craning his neck and passing noiselessly over the leads; but he left me a newspaper, wherein there was column after column concerning the robbery of the Bellonic, and a dish worthy of all journalistic sensation-mongering. I read this with avidity; with sharp appetite for the extraordinary hope which had come so curiously into my life.
"There's the Red Cross Line's Bellonic not a mile off on the starboard quarter," cried he exultingly, "and we're going to clear her. Come out, man, and get the finest breakfast you ever tasted."
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