It was at 2 A.M. when the Okky yell and the crash of a volley of pot-leg woke him, and he leaped up and through the gauze in one jump. He ran out onto the veranda, and met there Laura Slade. She was dressed, and had in her hand the cheap Skipton revolver which he had given her, and towards the purchase of which his father had once contributed a hard-to-spare ten shillings out of the whole half guinea that it cost. Moonlight poured down upon them pure and silvery from a clear night overhead, but all the land below up to the level of the veranda was filled with a mist that was white and thick as cotton wool. In this fog invisible black men screamed and yelled and cursed, and occasionally there came to them the red glare, and the roar, and the raw black-powder-smoke smell of the flintlocks. "The beggars will rush those barricades," said Carter, "if I don't look out. You stay here, Laura, and put that pistol down. It's a beastly dangerous toy." "I may want it for myself." "Don't be melodramatic. Now run into the mess-room, there's a good girl, and get down those two Winchesters, and load up the magazines. I'm going down to help the boys." But even as he spoke there came a sudden hard puff of the land breeze that made the mist swirl and twist up into ghostly life, and left canals and pools of clearness. He darted inside, snatched up one of the rifles, and crammed it full of cartridges. "I wish I'd a scatter-gun," he said. "I used to be a nailer at rabbits and the occasional grouse at home. However, it won't do to miss here, although the tool is new." He threw up the weapon to his shoulder, and shot as a game shot shoots, with head erect and both eyes staring wide at a leather charm-case on the broad black chest which he picked as his object. He did not know how to squint along the barrel. Then he pressed home the trigger, and had the thrill of knowing that he had shot his first man.... He warmed to the work after that, and fired on and on with deadly speed and accuracy, till the heated barrels of the repeaters burned Laura Slade's hands as she charged the magazines beneath them. From somewhere in the lower part of the factory came White-Man's-Trouble, and when in answer to the fusillade, showers of pot-leg began to rustle over the veranda and scream through the roof, that valiant person presently dragged out bedding to form a breastwork. But although Carter kicked him till his foot ached the Krooboy would not show his own head over it sufficiently to use a gun for the mutual defence. He stuck to it stolidly that he was a "plenty-too-much bad shot," and Carter was too much occupied in keeping up his own fire to spare time for further coercion. But as he changed rifles with Laura, he said every poisonous thing to White-Man's-Trouble that his mind could invent, and that African listened, but made neither answer nor reply.