Popple Opstein came in, looking anxious, until Nicholson told him that I was as "right as rain". "Man, you are lucky!" he cried, his face growing violet with excitement; "she had nearly four hundred rifles on board. Look! I’ve brought you one," and he held up a brand-new Mauser rifle. I handled it lovingly—my first capture. "You won’t ’pot’ at any poor wretched sentry on the Indian frontier, my beauty," I thought. "How did you find the _B.A._?" I asked; and my chum explained that the _Intrepid_ had taken my dhow in tow, steaming to the north’ard; that at daybreak the launch had been sighted, and though she had raised steam again she could not use her engines as something had fouled her propeller, below the waterline of course, where Mr. Scarlett could not get at it. "The result was," old Popple Opstein went on to tell me, "that we had to tow her as well, and when we anchored here sent our divers down to clear it." Later on Nicholson allowed me to dress, Percy smiling out of his great eyes when he brought me some clean clothes. Afterwards I went aboard the _Bunder Abbas_ to hear Mr. Scarlett’s account of what had happened and to see what repairs were still necessary. I found people from the _Intrepid_ busily straightening the bent stanchions and fitting a new after-awning cut from an old awning belonging to the cruiser. "She’ll look all right in a couple of days," Mr. Scarlett said, as he and I watched the last few boxes of ammunition being hoisted up through the dhow’s hatches and transferred to the _Intrepid’s_ battery deck. It was a most comforting sight. "Thought I’d seen the last of you, sir, when that big squall struck the dhow, and thought you’d seen the last of the _Bunder Abbas_ when she half-filled herself with water, her fires had been put out, and that hawser coiled itself round the screw. "My, sir, but I was being sick every few minutes with pure fright—I was that frightened that I wanted to jump overboard and get the drowning over quietly, without a lot of lascars howling and clawing round me—as I was waiting for ’em to do when she did sink. We made some kind of a sea-anchor with what was left of that awning and some spars, got her head to the wind, and baled her out with buckets—with buckets, sir! Three mortal hours that took, and another six to raise steam again, the lascars all preferring to drown up on deck, so not a blessed one would go below. "We never noticed that hawser round her screw till we let the steam in her engines, wound a few more turns round her screw, and brought them up all standing. Thank God! we hadn’t cast off our sea-anchor, or we’d have had all the making of another over again—and dead tired, tired as dogs, we all were."