His listeners laughed.
'And what happened to you?' asked Chase.
'Oh,' smiled Wooten, 'I sent the document to the admiral, with a covering letter, and jolly nearly got badly scrubbed for exceeding my duty and abducting the General. However, it was all right in the end, and I believe the old man was secretly rather pleased with what I'd done.'
'So he jolly well ought to have been,' remarked one of the watch-keepers.
'M'yes, but he was a man who didn't say much. However, a month later a British colonel and a couple of other officers came down from Pekin to confer with me about putting Kiang-fu in a state of defence in case the rebels came again, for by that time the powers that be had come to the conclusion that if they did capture it, it wouldn't do us any good. The colonel and I went ashore together, he with his two officers, and I with a sheet of paper and a pencil.
'"You'd better loophole that wall," he started off, pointing at a solid stone affair about three feet thick. "This house had better be demolished, and you'll have to dig a trench along here, with decent sand-bag head-cover. I should think a hundred and fifty rifles will be enough to man it, provided you have a couple of Maxims at each corner. Over there we'll have an emplacement for a field-gun, and there another trench."
'He went on like that the whole of one grilling forenoon, and by the time he'd finished I'd totted up my figures, and found he'd used the best part of a thousand men.
'"That's all right, sir," said I; "and when may I expect the regiment?"
'"Regiment!" he said, rather surprised. "What regiment d'you mean?"
'"The regiment for doing all this work and garrisoning the place, sir," said I innocently. "You've been talking about knocking down houses, erecting barricades, and digging trenches right and left. I've only got thirty men."