To judge by the amount of ammunition the cutter’s crew were expending, Evans was evidently certain of his enemy. Spurts of sand were flying up just in front of his men, although I could not see any flashes coming from out of those dark shadows. I admit that I felt considerably flustered; Mr. Scarlett’s face looked ghastly in the moonlight, and I wished with all my heart that I had not allowed Evans to sleep ashore. I could not help thinking of how Popple Opstein had been caught, and was very fearful that something of the same kind was going to happen again. If we could only have seen something to fire at it would have been less frightening, but there was nothing. Then Evans himself came rushing down to where the cutter lay, and yelled to me to open fire whilst his men shoved her off. I thought he could not possibly have made a mistake, so banged away with a Maxim at those shadows. "There, sir, there! Look there, sir!" Moore suddenly rushed at me, pointing excitedly to a dark object apparently crawling along just by the water’s edge not a hundred yards away. The cutter’s crew had seen it too, their bullets were spurting close to it, but Evans shrieked for them to come down and shove off the cutter, so I started the Maxim. We saw our bullets splashing all round, ceased fire, and waited for anything else to appear. Whatever that was, it never moved again. By this time Evans had got the cutter afloat, and had come alongside the _Bunder Abbas_. "Arabs crawling along the beach!" he shouted. "The sentry saw them first, fired at them—we’ve all fired at them—we’ve not seen any more since." "Were they firing at you?" I called down, when he left off shouting at me. He didn’t know—he was not certain of anything except that his fellows had managed to kill at least one man. At any rate, whatever had happened, no one was attacking us now. I stopped the Maxim, and together we waited on the qui vive all night, in case we were attacked again. When the moon sank, an hour and a half before the sun was due to take her place, it became extremely dark, which made it most trying and nervous work waiting for daylight. Instead of the good night’s sleep we had all promised ourselves, not a soul among us so much as closed his eyes after the alarm. At daybreak not a sign of any living thing could be seen on those desolate sand-hills or on the beach, so we ventured ashore to pick up the cutter’s masts and sails, which had been left behind in the panic. I went too, to have a look at the chap we had shot, and guess what we found—fifty yards along the beach—that paraffin tin! just where we had thought we had seen the enemy crawling along to attack us—simply riddled with bullets. It was like a nutmeg grater, and the sand all round it was scored and tossed about by hundreds more.