I simply sat down and laughed and laughed till I thought something would crack. The whole thing was so obvious. It was high water when the men went to sleep; as the tide fell it left that tin high and dry: the sentry, suddenly catching sight of it and its shadow, lost his head, thought it was someone crawling along the beach, let off his rifle at it, woke the others, and in their excitement they fired at every shadow they saw. "You killed him, sure enough," I roared, holding up the perforated tin; "the attack was repulsed with great slaughter." It was not until we had walked behind the sand-hills, and found not a single trace of footsteps, that Evans would allow that the whole thing had been a false alarm. "Your Maxim fired at it too," he said angrily. "You’ve made a fool of yourself as well." Evans never heard the last of his paraffin tin, nor did his boat’s crew; and, later on, when the yarn (with additions) spread aboard the _Intrepid_, we all came in for a great deal of chaff. For months afterwards, a messmate hankering after a black eye had only to ask a man belonging to that cutter’s crew, or to the _Bunder Abbas_, what kind of an Afghan a paraffin tin was most like, and he got one. However, we had made the cutter watertight and mended the foremast (after a fashion), though it was not strong enough to "look at" the shamel still blowing; so, leaving Evans to wait until it had blown itself out, I struggled up to wind’ard to have a look at Popple Opstein and find out how he had fared. I found him snugly anchored under the lee of Sheikh Hill. He was so close inshore that when I poked in to have a yarn, the "_B.A._" could not get within half a mile of his cutter. I pulled across in the dinghy. "Has no one fired at you?" I asked him, seeing that he was within easy range of the shore and even of those high cliffs. "Not a soul," he told me. "I’ve not seen a man, woman, or child these five days. Just look at those palm trees!" pointing in the direction where Bungi village lay. "They seem to have changed colour: they’re browner than they were; and we cannot see anyone moving about among the sand-hills, not even from the top of the mast. I can’t make it out." I had to tell him the yarn of last night’s brilliant little battle with the paraffin tin, and left him and his crew intensely amused. When I went back to the _Bunder Abbas_ I climbed her mast (much higher it was than the cutter’s masts), and through my glasses very carefully searched the flats behind those sand-hills. Not a single living, moving thing did I see, although I watched for quite a quarter of an hour. I sent Jaffa up to the masthead, and he came down puzzled, wanting me to land him so that he could find out what had happened. He smiled when I suggested danger. "You wait, sir," he said, and disappeared down below.