Whitmore suggested landing abreast the battery and rushing that.
Hoffman thought that could be done easily enough, though it was hardly worth it, in his opinion, as the guns were useless old smooth-bores. He was evidently afraid of irritating the people.
"If once they get out of hand," he said earnestly, with a haggard expression on his thin face, "they'll rush that house and murder Hobbs and little Sally."
Whitmore hadn't intended merely rushing the battery, but had thought out an entire scheme. One party was to rush the farther end of it—the right-hand end of it—the one opposite the fishing stakes, and they were not to try to do it silently, but to draw any fellows there towards them, whilst another party slipped round the left end and made their way up to the six-inch gun with a gun-cotton charge.
"The ground is all right if you could find your way in the dark," Hoffman told us.
"Why not send one of your fellows?" we suggested; but he said he couldn't trust them, couldn't be sure what they would do under fire, and besides, they were not natives of the place, and wouldn't know the way.
There are any number of small huts and fences and pitfalls there, and you could never get past them in the dark.
I had enough experience of Chinese villages to recognize that it would be a jolly ticklish job.
We left him then—he looked too ill to be worried any more—and went back to my cabin, taking his rough drawing with us.
The landing seemed easy enough—it was the getting back again which worried me. The party who held the right end of that battery would have to hold it for at least forty or fifty minutes; the destruction party couldn't possibly find their way up to the gun, disable it, and return in less time than that.