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Updated: June 14, 2025
Went through like a sixty-four-pound shot. Master Aleck! Ahoy! Frightened yerself away, my lad? Here, quick; come and lend a hand the boat's going down!" Tom Bodger talked and shouted, but he did not confine himself to words, for he saw the extent of the emergency. The boat seemed to be filling rapidly from the salt fount in the middle prior to going down.
"It's me, what there is left on me," growled Tom. "Great ugly rough 'un. Best thing you can do will be smuggle me a noo blue shirt from Jarsey." "Tom Bodger?" "Tom Bodger it is." "Why are you sitting on me? I thought " "You thought," growled Tom, scornfully. "What right's a chap like you to think?" "But I thought the press-gang had got me."
Mind bringing that lanthorn a bit forrarder? That's right; now I can see where I go." Tom Bodger had managed to find a hold for his stumps, and stood shaking himself as well as he could for the fact that he had a lad holding tightly on to each hand. "Well, yer don't feel like ghostses, my lads!" cried the sailor. "This here's solid flesh and bone, and it's rayther disappynting like."
Yes, it was after one smaller wedge-shaped piece had been lifted out by Tom Bodger, this wedge being like a key stone or bolt to hold the others in place so tightly that it was impossible so shift them from below.
For Tom Bodger, as he lay balanced upon the lower part of his chest, half in and half out of the boat, had got his fingers well under the side of the locker and was holding on with all the strength of his horny fingers.
A few minutes later the boy was seated in the stern of the boat, while Tom Bodger stood up, looking as if he, too, were sitting, as he thrust the little craft along by means of the boat-hook and the pier walls, while the fishermen walked along level with them to the end, where half a dozen of the boys had gathered.
Tom Bodger had just removed the last stone into a big recess, which had probably been formed by the smugglers to hold them, when the middy turned round sharply upon a dark figure which had, unseen before, been following them. "Hallo!" he cried. "Who are you?" "It's me, sir Dunning, sir the captain's gardener, sir. Come to see, sir, if I could be of any help."
Just then Aleck glanced round and saw that the officer who had gone ashore was returning, followed by the man who had accompanied him, and he turned to Bodger, who stood waiting for orders, before descending again to the boat. "I say, Tom," said Aleck, "that was cleverly aimed, but you had better mind or you'll be breaking one of the boys' legs." "Well-aimed, sir? Oh, that was nothing tickler.
Unfortunately, what the Army can afford to refuse in the case of Bill Walker, it cannot refuse in the case of Bodger. Bodger is master of the situation because he holds the purse strings. "Strive as you will," says Bodger, in effect: "me you cannot do without. You cannot save Bill Walker without my money."
And so the boys found, for they decidedly got the worst of it. Soon after, growing bolder, some of the most daring began to make approaches to snatch at the net or the ball of water-cord, but they gained nothing by that. For Tom Bodger never went out without his stick, a weapon he used for offence as well as defence, and there was not a boy there in Rockabie who did not know how hard he could hit.
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