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Updated: June 27, 2025
Ah! that doubt about Captain Mugford's safety magnified the danger of our own situation to our imaginations. If those outlaws could burn, in madness, such a harmless thing as the castaway brig, and could conquer such a powerful man as our salt tute, what might they not do here to us?
That evening the Triple Alliance lay awake until a late hour discussing the situation. Mugford's opening comment was certainly worth recording, "I hope she'll accept him." "Why?" "Why, because if she does, I should think old Welsby'll give us a half-holiday." It was evident at breakfast, to those who were in the know, that Acton was prepared for the venture.
Fry stayed at home instead of going to chapel, she would have understood better the meaning of Mrs. Mugford's words. For having packed off her husband, who was a feeble creature, to take the children out for a walk, Mrs.
Fry, and lamented that her ladyship should be so misguided as to employ a man like the Corporal, for it would surely end in no good, sojers never did. Look at Mrs. Mugford's boy that went for a marine, and came back with the shakums so bad that you could hear his teeth chattering a mile away when the fit was on him.
The only exercise that tempted us was swimming, and that, by Captain Mugford's permission, we now enjoyed twice each day before breakfast and after tea. What else is so delightful and health-giving?
The village was not a little awed by the strange turn that affairs had taken, for the two noisiest tongues in it had been silenced, Mrs. Fry's by the restoration of her Tommy's power of speech, Mrs. Mugford's by the arrest of her son.
One would never have suspected from Captain Mugford's manner that we were in any danger. His face was as calm and his hand as steady as if we were having the pleasantest sail imaginable; only the violence with which he smoked, ramming fingers full of tobacco into his pipe every few minutes, betokened any unusual excitement, but we knew how absorbed he was in his charge by his silence.
In common honesty, therefore, I am bound to commence my story. I am afraid that I cannot make it as interesting as Captain Mugford's, inasmuch as his was about the sea, while mine relates to the land. However, I will begin."
I cannot pretend to give it in old Mugford's language, so I present it in my own, keeping, however, closely to the facts he narrated. Some forty years ago, ay, more than that, I belonged for a few months to a revenue cruiser, on board which I volunteered, soon after my return from my second voyage, I think it was, or about that time.
Mugford's anxiety to keep the Corporal out of the village, and to get the idiot arrested, for it would probably be some days before a serjeant of Marines could arrive from Plymouth, or the idiot himself could be sent there, to decide if he were the deserter Henry Bale or not.
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