They kept on firing that gun, and sometimes they hit the wall and sometimes the house; and presently Miller, who had woke up, peeped over the wall, and said he could see the gun, and he lifted me up to look over, and I saw it as well, under some trees, about five hundred yards away, along the ridge on which the house was standing. He and Mr. Ching and the bluejackets began firing at the men round it; but they couldn’t see it clearly because of the smoke it made and the fog, and as they didn’t really know how to sight the Mauser rifles properly, they didn’t seem to be able to hit anybody.
At any rate, we couldn’t stop it firing, and it was knocking the house to pieces.
Then a shot struck the top of the wall, and made a gap in it, and stones went flying round, and one struck a bluejacket sitting down, not far from where Sally was, still asleep, struck him on the head, and killed him. Mr. Ching didn’t know what to do, because he was so worried lest she should be hurt; and two or three more came along, all hitting the wall, and it was jolly unsafe to stay anywhere near it, so we made her go and lie down behind a very big stone or rock behind the house, and leant some planks of wood against it to make a kind of roof to keep off falling stones.
If the firing became more dangerous, Mr. Ching did think of lowering her down a shallow well in the garden under the trees, but that was never wanted.
The rifle and Maxim firing became very heavy, and we could hear it coming rapidly nearer, and the fog, which was still lying very dense below the house, now swept away, and we could see that there were flat paddy fields there with a small hill on the other side. It was glorious to be able to look all round again, and suddenly Chinamen went flying down our side of that hill opposite, and we could hear cheering, and then, in a minute or two, some dark figures, waving their arms over their heads, came on to the sky line, and we knew that they were our people, and we all cheered tremendously.
You can have no idea what we all felt like, because, although we were expecting them, it was quite a different feeling when we actually saw them.
"Look there, Miller!" I shouted. "There’s a dog there running backwards and forwards;" and Miller spotted it too, and I knew that it must be jolly old "Blucher", and that the Captain must be there.