The Captain turned round and growled out "Umph!" but took no further notice. However, the word was passed round that a wounded Chinaman had attempted to kill him, and the men were so enraged that they made certain that there were no more wounded pirates left inside the square.
This is a fact, whatever you may say about the rights and wrongs of it.
The Chinese had had enough fighting to last them for a "month of Sundays", and let us alone after that, and gave us time to look after the wounded. The men, of course, all had their little packets of field dressings with them, and did a good deal of amateur doctoring, whilst Barclay, Hibbert of the Ringdove, the doctor of the Omaha, and their stretcher parties looked after the more seriously wounded.
Then we staggered down to the beach, wading through the fog with our wounded.
When I say staggered, I mean staggered. Our people had been fighting for practically twenty-four hours with no rest, and they were done to a "turn". After that strenuous sixty or seventy seconds' struggle, and the square had been re-formed, and the wounds had begun to pain, and arms and legs and bodies to feel stiff, reaction set in, and if you had seen them walking that last three hundred yards, you would have thought that most of them were drunk.
Lucky indeed it was that the Chinese let us alone till we could get the wounded down on the beach behind a bank, light several fires to comfort them, and gradually warmed our fellows up again.
I suppose that if they had charged out of the fog again, our men would have roused themselves and put up just as good a fight; but I must say that I felt most extremely anxious till we had the sea at our backs, and that bank at the top of the beach with a deep ditch below it in front of us.
We had hoped to find our boats lying off waiting for us, and tried to attract attention by shouting and firing rifles. Eventually we heard one of the gunboats begin firing a gun every half-minute. It turned out to be the Omaha, and presently she began to make a signal with her fog siren. We knew that she was feeling her way in towards us, by the sound of the blasts coming nearer; but of course we could see nothing whatsoever through that maddening nightmare of dirty fog, and out of it came the moaning blasts of the Omaha's siren with the message: "Have seen nothing of your boats since this morning. Omaha's boats have been sent down the coast to where gunboats' brigade originally landed, and have not come back."
We well knew that that meant a night to be spent on the bleak shore till the fog should clear away and allow the boats to find their way to us.
It was then that the tired men were set to work collecting drift wood and making fires under the bank, whilst Rashleigh and Trevelyan had to line the bank itself, and guard our two flanks across the beach.