His mind was made up in a moment, and he called Williams and Saunderson to him and showed them the position of affairs.
"Take forty of your men, Williams; leave me Sergeant Haig; creep down to the left till you get on a level with them, and rush their flank. There is no hurry, and don't waste cartridges."
"Thank you, sir, my men want something to warm them."
As they filed down the hill towards the left, the two field-guns again opened fire. Bannerman at last had been compelled to haul out in the face of the gale.
"Take cover, men," Cummins sang out to the few bluejackets and marines still left to him; "their bark is worse than their bite;" and he remained in the open watching and waiting for Williams to come in touch with the enemy.
He and his party had already disappeared among the trees which had swallowed Captain Hunter and his men nearly an hour before. Ten minutes went by and nothing happened. Minutes seemed like hours, and to his tense nerves it seemed that the Chinese were closing in on Captain Hunter, and that the Martini rifle fire was slackening. Surging through his brain swept the burning thought that he had made not one, but two mistakes.
To find the gun unable properly to control the harbour was bad enough, but now his second mistake was ten times more serious. The Chinese could fight, and his whole plans had been based on the opposite belief.
For a moment his own inherent optimism and resourcefulness, bred in the bone through many generations of fighting men, deserted him. He saw the failure of his scheme, the ruin it would bring to the whole squadron, and the end of poor Helston's ambitions. Of his own fate he cared nothing at that moment, but cursed himself for leaving the sea to venture a soldier's job, and for sacrificing, to his own self-assurance, the men who had so willingly followed him.
At that moment his vivid brain even pictured the final back-to-back struggle and the sobbing panting of stricken men as one by one they fell.
Would he be the last? he wondered.