“Yes,” says Mark. “We’d ’a’ had a f-fine chance to keep them off. Three parties of ’em. We might have kept off one or two, but some of ’em would have been sure to l-land, and where’d we have been? It was good strategy. They forced us to retreat—but it would have been rotten strategy for us to have stood and fought. As it is we drew off our army without l-l-loss and occupied a strong defensive position. If we’d stayed we might have lost an army corps or so.”
“Wish we had one of them aeroplanes,” says Plunk.
“We hain’t,” says I. “Nor we hain’t got balloons nor submarines. We hain’t got anythin’—not even a chance.”
“We’ve got a chance,” says Mark, sharp-like, “till we’re driven off the roof. We’ll make the enemy take this floor, and then we’ll r-r-retreat to the next, and then, by Jimminy! we’ll take to the roof. I don’t want to hear any more talk about no chance. We’ve got all the chance we need.”
All this time we were keeping our eyes on the Japanese, who had landed and seemed sort of surprised they did it so easy. They came cautious-like, because I guess we’d made them think a bit in the last fight and they didn’t want to walk slam into a trap. They gathered off among the spruce-trees and had a council of war. Then they came toward the citadel in a body, with The Man walking ahead.
He was considerable improved, but it would be several days before he’d be fit to go to a party. His eye-glass was there, and his dude clothes, but we had his cane. Somehow he didn’t look natural without it. It seemed like that cane was a part of him, like it had grown on him.
They came up close, and then Mark gave the word to fire. We let them have several good licks with our slingshots, and they backed off for another talk. Next time they came on the run, and before we could pelt them enough to do any good they were under the gallery where we couldn’t hit them. But we could hear them moving around, and, by laying down on our stomachs, we could see them through cracks between the boards.
First they went inside, looking for a stairway, but of course they didn’t find any. We were just out of stairways and didn’t expect to get any more for quite a while.
We held a council of war ourselves.
“There’s just t-three ways they can get up,” says Mark. “One is to get the stairs lowered, one is to climb up over the front balcony with l-l-ladders, and the last is to get into a second-story window on the west side with a ladder. They can’t attack the back. The water keeps ’em off t-t-there.”