The reaction after the strain of the last four days was now very great, and there was no disguising the fact that I was as weak as a cat. I had had no real sleep for at least four nights, and listening to the long, slow, snoring noise coming from Mr. Scarlett’s bed made me drop off to sleep too. When I woke it was night, but by the light of the lamp I saw Percy—a melancholy-looking figure in white—squatting on the floor at the side of the gunner’s bed, with his eyes fixed on his hero’s bandaged head. He turned and smiled at me when I moved, but only for a moment, turning again like some big faithful dog to watch the gunner. For two whole days the only other people I saw were Nicholson, who doctored me, and the head boy—his yellow turban once more as smart as a new pin—who brought me food and fed me. At the end of those two days Mr. Scarlett began to show signs of returning consciousness, and Percy, who had not left him day or night, wept tears of joy when his eyes opened and he asked where he was. Popple Opstein was now allowed to come and talk to me. From him I heard how the _Intrepid_ had been called away from Muscat, on what turned out to be a wild-goose chase, after some dhow reported to be loading rifles down the coast; how she had heard on her return that Jask telegraph-station had been attacked in force and the telegraph cut; and how she had come across at full speed. "I’m almost certain Jassim was the chap who brought the news which took us down the coast. We heard he’d shot you dangerously, and I put two and two together. My dear old chap, I was in the dickens of a funk. The skipper had the men all ready waiting to land; they were over the side and in the boats almost before the anchor dropped, and we were only just in time. Your fellows were all pushed up against the side of the building, with a crowd of chaps howling round them, and were getting the worst of it, half of them laid out already. Another half-hour and it would have been ’finish’." He gave me a list of the casualties, and they were very severe. Jones had died of his wounds, and Moore’s body had been found on the rocks close to the smashed dinghy, with three dead Afghans near him; so the poor, irritating chap had made a great fight for his life. There was not a single one of the "_B.A._"’s who had not a wound of "sorts".