In less than a minute not a living Chinaman was to be seen, but a desultory fire commencing again from "Bush Hill" showed that they were still under some control.
As Captain Hunter and his party, flushed with success and breathless with their exertions, swung into the plateau, a shrapnel burst above them, and the bullets, pouring down all round them, covered them with dust. A marine fell with a yell, his thigh smashed, but no one else was touched, and Hunter ran up to Cummins, who had now recovered his composure. He was simply mad with the physical joy of fighting, and this hailstone of shrapnel bullets had simply intoxicated him.
"My country! that was a pretty bit of fighting," he roared; "worth ten years of ordinary life. I've got your oil, and we've brought every man Jack back again. There's a man on the other side I'd like to shake hands with—after my own kidney, that chap—a huge fellow with a black beard; led 'em on time after time, but those skunks of Chinamen would not follow him."
"He led the first rush," Cummins answered, trying to calm him, "and led it well, too. Have you lost many men, sir?"
"What a brute I am!" he cried, the joy of battle quickly vanishing. "I don't know exactly, but we've brought them all back. Before we came ashore I told my men that if anyone fell he should not be left, and—and they are splendid fellows, Cummins."
The casualties were serious enough. Five had been killed—two of the destroyer's and three of the Strong Arm's—and eleven wounded—three of these belonging to Captain Williams's party, three to the destroyer, and the other five to Hunter's party.
"That oil is worth a good deal now," said Cummins sadly.
* * * * *
Behind the gun-pit parapet Dr. Richardson busied himself with the wounded, a lieutenant of the Strong Arm, Gibbins by name, took charge of the gun in place of poor Pattison and commenced to fill the recoil cylinders, the less fatigued of the men carried on hauling sand-bags towards the edge overlooking the sea, whilst the remainder, thoroughly exhausted, lay down behind the breast-works.
Shells were still coming from those field-guns, but the Strong Arm's, reassured by the Laird's, who had already begun to despise them, soon learnt that they were harmless so long as they kept down behind their sand-bags.