Hemming ordered Smith and Hicks to windows on the other side of the house.
"Shall we shoot over their heads, or may we pump it right into them?" asked Hicks.
"I leave it to your own discretion," replied Hemming.
Smith grinned. He promised himself an easy interpretation of the word.
Hemming took the window in the upper hall, overlooking the front steps and the driveway, himself.
There was not a figure in sight. But the glass of the window lay broken on the floor, and the diamond-hunter kept up his drunken disturbance on the veranda below. The firing out of the shadows continued, and drew nearer. Hemming extinguished his cigar and sat on the floor. He enjoyed quite a novel sensation when a bullet sang its way through the open window, like a great bee, and ripped into a shelf full of books half-way down the hall. He had never before been under fire behind a window. All about him he could hear the thumping of bullets against the tiles of the outer walls. Some one shouted in English, ordering the drunken sailor to come away from the house.
"Yer want my dimund, that's wot yer want," he shouted back, "but yer don't get so much ash a peep at it, see?"
Hemming heard and frowned, as he polished his eye-glass on his sleeve. Two shots sounded in quick succession from a room on the left of the hall. Hemming heard Santosa laugh, and O'Rourke congratulate him. The firing now seemed to centre mostly upon the front of the villa. Hemming, as yet, had not returned a shot. Suddenly the white man, moved by a drunken whim, left his hammering at the door, and pranced into the starlight. The shooting of his friends was everywhere. Elevation had little attention from them, and an unusually low ball found him out. He did not spring forward with uplifted hands; neither did he clutch at his breast and stagger onward. With an expression of pained astonishment on his face, and a heave of his fat shoulders, he sank to his hips, and then rolled over and lay still. To Hemming, it looked as if his fat legs had simply crumpled under him like paper.
A dozen men charged across the starlit driveway. Hemming dropped two of them. The others ran up the steps and across the veranda, and threw themselves against the door. But they were small men, and the door was a heavy one, and well bolted. Hemming left the window, and at the head of the stairs met O'Rourke.
"A brace and a half to me," said that gentleman, lightly.