Pat, pat, again overhead, and the missiles fell among the stones.
“We must stop this,” said Roberts.—“Hold your fire, my lads, till you have a good chance. One telling shot is worth a hundred bad ones.”
“Ah! Look out,” cried Bracy, who was scanning the distant grove of large trees across the valley a quarter of a mile away. “There they go, breaking cover to take up ground more forward, to have at us again.”
For, all at once, some fifty white-coats became visible, as their owners dashed out of one of the patches of cedars and ran for another a furlong ahead. The lads were looking out, and rifle after rifle cracked. Then there was quite a volley to teach the enemy that a quarter of a mile was a dangerous distance to stand at when British soldiers were kneeling behind rocks which formed steady rests for the rifles they had carefully sighted.
Five or six men, whose white-coats stood out plainly in the clear mountain air against the green, were seen to drop and not rise again; while the rest, instead of racing on to the cover in front, turned off at right-angles and made for a woody ravine higher up the right face of the valley; but they did not all reach it in safety.
The firing brought back the Colonel, who nodded thoughtfully on hearing Roberts’s report.
“Hurry on,” he said; “the shelf descends to quite an opening of the valley a quarter of a mile farther on, and there is a patch of wood well out of reach of the hills, where I shall camp to-night. The advance-guard have cleared it of a similar party to that you describe.”
“It was getting time,” said Bracy to Roberts as the Colonel rode on. “I shouldn’t have liked for us to pass the night on this shelf. Think they’ll attack us after dark?”
“Can’t say, my son. If they do—”
“Well, what?” asked Bracy.