"What's that to you?" rejoined Sprawl; "give us a clear road, my darling, or maybe we shall cooper you, after a very comical fashion."
We had scarcely uttered the words when a discharge of grape burst from the green mound, crashing amongst the branches, and sending them down in a shower on our heads; while all the neighbouring trees, like Jacob's wands, became, in the twinkling of an eye, patched with white spots, from the rasping of the shot.
"Forward!" shouted Davie Doublepipe--"follow me, men!" when--rattle--a platoon of musketry was fired at us. The grape had missed, from a wrong elevation of the gun; not so the small arms--one of our party was shot dead and three wounded; but the spring was nevertheless made. We scrambled across the brushwood that had been heaped on the road, and to the top of the stockade, about six feet high, that it masked, and presently found ourselves in the presence of thirty determined fellows, who were working like fiends in the endeavour to slew round seven eighteen-pound carronades, that had been mounted on a stage of loose planks, and pointed towards the river. Apparently they had been unable to accomplish this with more than one, the gun that had just been fired, which in the recoil had slid off the platform, and was now useless, from sinking in the semisolid black soil, two of the others having already, in the attempt to train them round on us, capsized and sunk right out of sight in it. So aid from the cannon they now had none; but never did men show a more daring front--as they stood their ground, exchanging blow for blow most manfully.
The fort, or battery, was a stockaded enclosure, about fifty yards square. Towards the river face, before we attempted to turn it, the guns had been mounted on a stage of loose planks, a most unstable foundation, from resting on running mud. The brushwood between them and the river grew thick and close, and opposite the muzzle of each cannon the leaves were scorched and blackened. The wooden platform extended about twelve feet in breadth landward, but beyond it the whole inside of the fort was soft black mud, through which, on the side farthest from the river, protruded the stumps of the haggled brushwood, where it had been cleared by the hatchet; while branches were thickly strewed on the surface nearer the guns, to afford a footing across it. These branches, however, had been removed for a space of ten feet, at the spot we boarded at, where the slimy ground appeared poached into a soft paste, so that no footing might be afforded to an attacking force.