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Updated: September 1, 2025
Parrington called out to the signalman near him: "Send this signal across to Corregidor: 'We are going to relieve the wireless telegraph detachment at Mariveles, and shall call at Corregidor on our way back." The Corregidor battery answered the signal, and informed Parrington that Colonel Prettyman expected him for lunch later on.
"True; we have had Peace," said Parrington, and launched out into such glowing details of that criminal's last moments that I began to hope the diversion might prove permanent. But Lord Thornaby was not to be denied. "William and Charles are both dead monarchs," said he. "The reigning king in their department is the fellow who gutted poor Danby's place in Bond Street."
It was, it must be, the window to which the intrepid Parrington had descended from the one above. "Exactly!" said Raffles in answer to my exclamation. "And that's the window I have been watching these last few weeks.
"It is certainly kind of them to send us a boat," said Parrington. "I wonder what they want, anyhow." He gave orders to stop the boat and to clear the gangway, and then, watching the German cutter with interest, awaited its arrival.
Slowly the hull of the hostile ship rose above the horizon, and when she was still at a distance of about four thousand yards there was a flash at her bows, and the thunder of a shot boomed across the waters, echoed faintly from the mountains of Mindoro. "They're too far away," said Parrington, as the enemy's shell splashed into the waves far ahead of the line of gunboats.
The hawsers were cast off in feverish haste, and the Mindoro once more steamed out into the bay at the fastest speed of which the old craft was capable. Parrington had regained his self-command in face of the new task that the events just described, which followed so rapidly upon one another's heels, laid out for him.
The shot boomed across the sunny, blue expanse of water, driving a white puff of smoke before it. The shell disappeared in the waves about one hundred yards ahead of the Japanese steamer. The next shot struck the ship, leaving in her side a black hole with jagged edges just above the waterline. "Splendid!" cried Parrington. "Keep that up and we'll have the villain in ten shots."
It was some moments before Ernest tittered and Parrington felt for his pencil; and in the interim I had made short work of my hock, though it was Johannisberger. As for Raffles, one had but to see his horror to feel how completely he was off his guard. "In itself, I have heard, it was not a sympathetic case?" was the remark with which he broke the general silence. "Not a bit."
At this moment Parrington observed a dark cloud of smoke in the direction of the harbor of Manila suddenly detaching itself from below and sailing upward like a fumarole above the summit of a volcano, where it dispersed in bizarre shapes resembling ragged balls of cotton. Almost immediately a dull report like a distant thunderclap boomed across the water.
As they reached the gate they saw, standing before it in the pale light of dawn, a mule cart, on which lay an enormous barrel. The colonel called the sentry, and learned that the cart had been standing before the gate since the preceding evening. The colonel went into the guard-room while Parrington remained in the street.
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