At last the Commander was "up", and trotting down the slope with a bit of grass between his teeth. Glover followed, vainly trying to draw his cutlass. The men sprang after them, breasted the rise, swept over some level ground, and with a final rush leaped over a parapet of sand-bags, swarmed around the gun, and found—Gunner Bolton doing "sentry-go" backwards and forwards in rear of the gun! There was not a Chinaman to be seen.
Some of the men simply sat down and laughed, others, furious, cried out that "They'd been jolly well had," and that "Gunner Bolton 'ad made fools of 'em all, 'e 'ad," and that "They would jolly well knock 'is blooming 'ead off, that they would, next general-leave day."
"Fall in, men," sang out the Commander, with a twinkle in his eye. "You shall have plenty of fighting presently."
Then he sent them back for the water-breakers and armourers' stores which they had dropped when fixing bayonets, whilst he and Williams, the captain of marines, took a rapid survey of the position, and Pattison and his blue-jackets commenced to overhaul the gun.
The top of the hill was flattened out into a little plateau about a hundred yards long, sloping gently towards the harbour and then falling abruptly into the steep side of the hill with a quite well-defined edge. It had its back to the sea and was facing the harbour.
At the east end, the end nearest to the entrance channel, and in the corner overlooking the sea, was the gun, an obsolete 12-inch Krupp, mounted in a deep circular pit, and poking its muzzle over a wall of sand-bags ten or twelve feet thick and about six feet high.
A little cluster of stunted trees hid the gun from view out at sea. Their trunks had already been half sawn through in preparation for felling them, and a few more strokes of the axe would bring them down.
The first thing to be done was to ascertain whether the gun could be made ready for service, as otherwise it was useless to remain there.
Already Pattison and his men had hauled away the tarpaulin covering its massive breech, and were rapidly examining the mounting and training gear.
"Rough and clumsy, sir, but we shall be able to train her round all right," he reported.