I did feel so sorry, because we should never have found where Sally was but for him, and he had done so magnificently; and I knew that the Captain would be so sorry too, especially as Mr. Hoffman had beaten him at weight lifting.
"You go and get some more sleep," Mr. Ching told me; but I felt so much better, that I implored him to let me stay with him, and he did.
"We are doing all right, aren't we, sir?"
"So far; but this fog makes it difficult for us to see them, and I fear they may try and rush us. We have not much ammunition left."
We went all round the house, and he spoke very cheerfully to all his men. They were at all the windows with their rifles pointing out, and peering into the fog. One or two men were wounded, and sitting with their backs to the wall.
"I am going to tell the news to Hobbs and his daughter," Mr. Ching said, when we had come to that end of the house. I had been going to ask him if I could do this, but he said it so curtly, that I thought he wanted to do it by himself, so didn't go with him.
"You have a lot of blood on your face, sir," I told him. "I hope you aren't hurt much."
"Only a stone," he said; but he wiped it off, till I told him there was no more showing—he wiped it off very carefully—and then went up the ladder.
Miller hadn't the faintest idea what time it was—somewhere about midnight, he thought. We were standing near one of the open shutters, and could just see the three or four bluejackets who were guarding it. Outside there was simply a grey black wall of fog. It had settled down so thickly, that you couldn't see a yard from the house, and was drifting in through the windows all damp and beastly. Everything was pitch dark; I couldn't see the flames at all (as a matter of fact, the huts had burnt themselves out, but I didn't know that); and Miller told me that everything had been pretty quiet during the last half-hour, nothing except an occasional shot, and that the Scotchman and Martin were still in the upper room. "We had a stiffish bit of business getting back to the house, sir. There seemed to be thousands of them on top of us, but they seem to have cleared off—some of them—and I'm thinkin' they may be after going for the Captain's party."
"Have you heard nothing of them—no firing or anything like that?" I asked; and when he said "No", asked him if he thought they would be able to find their way to us. He scratched his head and wouldn't give an answer.