good many times and had filled him up with sea-water he began to weaken. Then I whispered in his ear, “You’re for the sharks in five minutes if you don’t give in, my man.” He said, “I’ll see you hanged first, you dirty pirate,” and he turned to bite my hand. So I began to drown him in good earnest – mark over.’
Sullivan reached for his gun. There was the sound of wings high overhead, and they listened tensely. The noise circled above them and came lower. Suddenly his gun leapt to his shoulder: two orange flames stabbed the darkness, and from out on the lake came two heavy splashes, one after the other, and a threshing in the water.
Sullivan waited for a moment, with his gun poised, to see whether the ducks would circle again, but they swung wide and high.
‘Now let’s see whether your animal can do his stuff,’ he said.
‘Fetch, Chang,’ said Derrick, pointing to the lake. Chang hurled himself in, and they heard him splashing in the distance.
‘I really believe there’s some good in the old flea-bag,’ said Sullivan. ‘It sounds as though he were trying to bring them both.’
‘Fetch them, Chang,’ called Derrick, hoping desperately that his uncle was right. Chang barked in answer, and they heard him surging towards them. He reappeared, dripping and charmed with himself: there was a large stick in his mouth.
‘That will be very useful for cooking the birds, no doubt,’ said Sullivan.
‘Ducks, Chang. Go and fetch the ducks. Birds on the water.’ For half a moment Derrick thought of flapping his arms and going quack, quack to help Chang understand. The dog looked worried, and offered the stick again. ‘No, not that,’ said Derrick, scarlet in the face. ‘Fetch the ducks, Chang. Ducks, there’s a good dog.’ Chang was very willing to please, and he plunged in again, but Derrick was almost certain that he would only bring back another stick.
‘Don’t blame him,’ said Sullivan. ‘You can’t expect beauty as well as intelligence. We’ll try and shoot them so that they fall over the land next time. They were widgeon, by the sound of them.’
Chang swam back. In his mouth, beautifully held by one wing, there was a fine teal.
‘Good dog,’ cried Sullivan, giving him a piece of meat. ‘Why, that’s strange, this is a teal.’
‘Perhaps there was just one teal among the widgeon,’ said Derrick, trying to conceal his triumph, and it appeared that he was right, for the next bird that Chang brought in was a widgeon, a lovely drake, with a sulphur-yellow crest.
‘How did you manage to hit them, Uncle Terry?’ asked Derrick, smoothing the widgeon’s feathers. ‘I never saw them at all.’
‘Nor did I,’ replied Sullivan. ‘You can’t wait to see them in this light. You have to shoot at the sound. It’ll be better in half an hour. These were probably the first birds to get moving.’
They stood in silence for a while, listening for the ducks. ‘Did you drown the man?’ asked Derrick eventually.
‘What man? Oh, Ross. No, I didn’t drown him, but I let him get thoroughly waterlogged, and then I towed him back to his schooner. By that time I found my crew had licked his – they were not much good without their skipper – and they hauled us aboard. At first I was afraid that I had overdone it: he looked too much like a corpse altogether. But when we had up-ended him and let the ocean out of him he came to. But he was very sick for a long while, and I had to nurse him carefully – it was touch and go with him for weeks. I ran his schooner up the coast and tied up alongside my ship for a while. I found that he had no great liking for his job, or for his employers, who had never paid him and never would, for by the time we had transferred the cargo we had news that there had been another revolution in Rococo. Well, to cut it short, we took a liking to one another, and we decided to ship together. I sold my cargo, ship and lease to a big American company, who could deal with the legal side of the matter better than I could, and we sailed for the Friendly Islands after copra. That sounds like mallard. They’re coming our way. Now you take the birds on the right, and shoot well ahead.’
The sound of the wings came down as the duck planed in to pitch on the lake. The four shots cracked out, and there were two splashes in the water. Chang stood tense and expectant.
‘You want to shoot well ahead as they are crossing,’ said Sullivan, reloading. ‘Wait for it, now, they are circling again.’ He knocked another bird out of the flight, but before Chang could bring it in there were more duck overhead, Muscovy duck this time, and from then on they stood there as the dawn came grey around them, shooting so often that the barrels of their guns were warm.
‘I think that will do,’ said Sullivan at last, surveying the pile of birds in the butt.
‘There’s another flight coming in,’ said Derrick, eagerly.
‘Well, get one more brace if you like,’ said Sullivan, ‘but we’ll finish then.’
‘Will that be the end of the flighting?’
‘No. They’ll go on for quite a long time still, but we have got all we can eat. You don’t want to kill for the sake of killing, do you?’
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Derrick, rather regretfully, as he watched the duck skim in and rise as they saw the movement in the butt.
‘I’m glad you don’t,’ said Sullivan. ‘I hate these big shoots where you kill a hundred brace or more just for the fun of it. Shooting for the pot is another matter.’
In the thin, cold light they made their way back through the reeds with their game-bags heavy on their backs, and when they had mounted again and had ridden a mile or so, Derrick said, ‘So you never were a pirate in the China Seas.’
‘What’s biting you?’ asked Sullivan, looking round at him curiously. ‘You’re very full of questions this morning, young fellow.’
‘Oh, it was only something that Hsien Lu said,’ said Derrick, going red, ‘and I thought that if it was true, then what you said about war – well, I mean, piracy is a kind of war, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, that’s the trouble. I see. Yes, real piracy is almost exactly the same as aggressive war, and it has got some of the same phoney glamour when you hear about it at a distance. Well, you can set your mind at rest about that. I have done some pretty queer things in my time: I did a good many things when I was young that I would not do now, but I never hung out the black flag in earnest. I think I know what Hsien Lu was talking about. You know that there are plenty of genuine pirates in the South China Sea? Some of them are ordinary merchant junks that will turn pirate if they find a weaker junk in the offing – sort of half-time pirates – and some are the real article. But both kinds like to get hold of a white captain if they can – I don’t mean the coast-wise pirates, the ones you hear most about, but the gentlemen who work on the high seas. That was what we had in mind when we cast around in Wang Tso for the leaders of the Benign Chrysanthemum. We had had a brush with the pirate junk belonging to the Fraternal Lotuses in which they had killed our bo’sun, a Kanaka who had been with us for years – we were very fond of him, and we thought our best way of dealing with the situation was to blow the Fraternal Lotuses out of the water. Perhaps what we ought to have done was to have lodged a complaint in the proper quarters, but I never knew any good coming of that in China, particularly in those days. So what we did was this: we told a good friend of ours, Suleiman ibn Yakoub, that he had bought the Wanderer – we had the Wanderer by then – and
