Webster seized his oar and went on, but I shouted to him to come back, and with a brilliant thought he made fast the rope and we hauled him back. As the dinghy came near I saw that Dobson was dead. We lifted him out and Mr. Scarlett jumped in. "I’m going, sir," he said, and I was so astonished that I could say nothing. We laid Dobson on deck and jumped back to work our guns, whilst Mr. Scarlett and Webster pulled madly towards the cutter, paying out the rope and steering wildly. We yelled with delight when they reached the cutter and passed the rope inboard. In a moment the cutter’s crew had clambered into the water again to lighten the boat. They held up their hands to signal my rope made fast. I gave the "_B.A._" a touch astern and stopped her engines, the rope tautened, the cutter’s crew shoved and pushed and yelled that she was moving. In half a minute we had her afloat, her men scrambling in as she slid into deep water; in ten minutes we were out of range, and in half an hour she and the dinghy were both alongside, and I had dropped anchor two miles from the cliffs and out of sight of the dhow. The cutter was peppered with bullet holes, her gunwales, sides, and oars splintered and grooved in a hundred places. She leaked like a sieve, and water filled her to her thwarts. She had one dead man on board—one of those left as boat-keepers—the one I had seen shot when working the Maxim; one man shot through the chest and leg; four others wounded (one with three bullet wounds through soft parts), besides Popple Opstein. "It went clean through my calf muscles," he told me. "It’s nothing." Not until then did anyone remember the man who had started to swim back towards the _Bunder Abbas_ when those Afghans charged down. He had not been seen since, and must have been drowned, or perhaps killed by a bullet in the head. Two of the cutter’s crew had been left on shore dead, so these made the cutter’s total casualties three killed, one missing, and five wounded. Only four had escaped untouched. The dead man and the wounded were all brought aboard the _Bunder Abbas_: the dead who might only have been wounded, the wounded who so easily might have been dead. A turn of the head, and a bullet which would have only grazed your ear blows out your brains; you drop a cartridge, stoop to pick it up, and a bullet which would have gone through your heart wings on its way without your knowing that it had ever come and gone.