A good many rifle-bullets and a few shells from field-guns came our way, but no one was touched.
Late in the afternoon, when the firing was slacking down, one of the torpedo-boats came buzzing along quite close to us. She was on her way to the transports, and as she passed us, we saw that her funnel and some boiler-plates she'd built up on deck, round her machine gun, were pitted with bullet-marks. They looked, for all the world, like the inside of a nutmeg grater. Two bodies were lying close to the machine gun, but the rest of the crew were coiled down, resting, and not taking the least notice of them.
She went alongside one of the transports and came hurrying back. Standing just for'ard of the funnel was old Gerald, smoking his pipe. He was still in the same rig--brown boots and gaiters, white duck riding breeches, white duck Norfolk jacket, and white polo helmet--and José, with his scarlet sash, was squatting on the deck at his feet. He looked up as he went by, and nodded cheerfully as I waved to him, and he saw who I was. He was then taken alongside the flagship.
Firing did not cease till dark, but none of us thought that the green and yellow flags would be flying in the morning, and we were quite right. Los Angelos itself was deserted, and white flags as big as table-cloths were hoisted above the forts up the mountain-side.
The transports immediately went alongside the wharves and began to disgorge their ragged little brown troops; the cruisers and gunboats took up their old moorings behind the breakwater, and we anchored again outside it and just clear of the lighthouse.
You can imagine how keen we were to go ashore and see what was happening; but Captain Roger Hill was as strict as he was prim, and refused to give any leave whatever.
'If we had your Skipper--"Old Tin Eye"--here, Billums, I bet every soul would be ashore by now,' Ginger said; but I don't know, he had had a bit of a fright when our mids. fought those 4.7's, and had been much stricter ever since.
We could only hang about on deck with our telescopes and watch the little insurgents pouring out of Los Angelos, and crowding along that road, up the mountain-side, towards Santa Cruz. A long way up, at a place where it curved sharply, the yellow and green flag was still flying, and we could make out trenches and could see the wheels of some field-guns half hidden among the trees. The trenches were continued up the mountain-side, and it looked, from where we were, as if a hundred brave men, behind them, could stop a thousand.