Both at once took a steady aim and fired, and a second later Jack seized his glasses and saw one of the horses in the gun team rear up and fall backwards.
Another and another shot followed, one of the gunners and a second horse being hit. Then the gun was hurriedly limbered up again and galloped back out of rifle fire. Ten minutes later there was a puff of smoke, followed in about half a minute by a sharp report, and by the ominous hum of a shell overhead.
“Ha, ha!” Jack chuckled coolly; “they’ll want to do a deal better than that to turn us out of this. Look out, here comes another!”
As he spoke there was a second puff, and this was followed by a deafening thud overhead and by a loud explosion behind the house.
“Not a bad shot that,” Jack remarked serenely. “It touched the roof, ricochetted off, and burst away behind.”
The next shot proved almost more alarming, for it was a shrapnel shell, and exploded some hundred yards in front of the farmhouse, sending a hail of bullets spattering in all directions.
“They’ve got the range now, and I think we had better get below,” said Jack. “We shall be quite safe from a rush, for the Boers cannot come close while their friends are shelling us. I expect they will continue firing till they have smashed the place to pieces, and then they will gallop up full-tilt. That will be our time. We will lie low, and make them think that the shelling has killed or wounded all of us. We will hold our fire till they are at the railings, and then we will blaze into them. I fancy we shall be safe enough till nightfall, but then, if help does not reach us, it will go hard with us. Tim must have slipped into the town by this, so we can hope for the best.”
“I will play something for you, if you like,” said Eileen Russel at this moment. “You don’t want any cheering up, but just to show you that I feel quite safe in your hands, and have no fear of the Boers, you shall have some music. What shall it be?”
“Let us have ‘God Save the Queen!’ Miss Russel,” Wilfred cried. “It will make us feel all the better.”
Accordingly the brave girl stood up at one end of the cellar, and in that curious place, and with shell and bullets plunging through the walls of the house above, and occasionally exploding with a deafening noise which drowned the music for the moment, made the air throb with those strains which no Englishman worthy of the proud name can listen to unmoved. It was indeed a strange proceeding, and to the Boer horseman who galloped up just then, during a lull in the firing, and approached the farmhouse within fifty yards, it was totally inexplicable. Here were a few mad Englishmen listening to the strains of their national anthem with bullets flying all about them. “Surely they are a strange people!” he thought. And plucky too, for that violin he heard was played by a young girl’s hands.