Colonel Rennie, being capable of brisk decision, makes the best of a disconcerting situation. When the flames and smoke from those fired plantation buildings drive him into the open before he is ready, he promptly orders a charge. This his riflemen obey; for the inexorable Patterson, across the river, is already upon them with those eighteen-pounders, and his solid shot are mowing ghastly swaths through the rifle-green ranks, tossing dead men in the air like old bags. With so little inducement to stand still, the riflemen hail that word to charge as a relief, and head for the General's mud walls at double quick.
The oncoming Colonel Rennie and his English are met full in the face by a tempest of grape, from Major Humphrey and the pirates Dominique and Bluche, which throws them backward upon themselves. They bunch up and clot into lumps of disorder, like clumps of demoralized sheep in rifle-green. At that, Commodore Patterson serves his eighteen-pounders with multiplied speed, and the great balls tear those sheep-clumps to pieces, staining with crimson the rifle-green. The English marvel at the artillery work of the General's men, whose every shot comes on, well aimed and low, bringing death in its whistling wake.
They should reflect: The theory, not to say the eye, which aims a squirrel rifle will point a cannon.
Colonel Rennie, when his English recoil, keeps on—face red with grief and rage.
“It's my time to die!” says he to Captain Henry. “But before I die, I shall at least see the inside of those mud walls.”
Colonel Rennie is wrong. A bullet finds his brain as he lifts his head above the breastworks, and he slips back dead in the ditch outside. Major King and Captain Henry die with him, pierced each by a handful of bullets.
When the English flinch and Colonel Rennie falls, the bugler—a boy of fourteen—climbs a tree, not one hundred yards from the General's line. Perched among the branches, he sounds his dauntless charges. The General gives orders to let the boy alone. And so the little bugler, protected by the word of the General, sings his shrill onsets to the last.
Finally an artillery-man goes out to him.
“Come down, my son!” says the cannoneer. “The war's about over!”
The little bugler comes down, and is at once taken to the fatherly heart of Papa Plauche, who declares him to be a sucking Hector, and is for adopting him as his son on the spot, but is restrained by thoughts of Madam Plauche.