"The fort is--let me see, between three hundred and four hundred yards from here." There was a puff of smoke from a window of the square, gray building, followed a moment later by a distant report, and the humming of a guitar string in the air above their heads. Curtis lay down again. "Damn bad shot," observed his companion. "Makes me sick after being in South Africa. If that had been a Boer now, he would have hit you. But these Turks cannot shoot. So we will make a rush. We will have our best shots crawl in close and fire on the doors and windows. Then I take a detachment and run in. When the Turks appear we drop down, and our men fire another volley. Then we yump up and make another dash. So we take it." The blockhouse was a little above them, on a rocky eminence that commanded the gleaming sheet of Suda Bay, in shape like a written capital V. Four warships, two Englishmen, a Frenchman and a German, lay resting at anchor, thin columns of smoke bending from their funnels and drifting away amicably together. Something over a mile and a half away, those great floating engines of death and terror looked as innocent as a toy fleet on a duck pond. Entrenched in the rocks all about Lindbohm was an armed band, one hundred and fifty in number, consisting of Cretan insurgents, youthful Italian enthusiasts and Greek Turcophobes. Behind them rose the tremendous piles of Ida and the White mountains, and below them lay the bright, smiling valleys of the coast and the lower slopes, where an occasional white village gleamed among its olive orchards. "How many are there of 'em?" asked Curtis. Lindbohm smiled, and raising his big pink hand to his blonde mustache, gave it a playful pull. "That's yust what we're going to find out," he replied. Calling an insurgent to him who spoke French, he explained the plan for the assault. He himself selected the men who were to accompany him, twenty-five in number, and such as possessed bayonets proceeded to fix them to their rifles. The places from which the shooting was to be done were selected, and the men began to get to them as rapidly as possible. Lindbohm and Curtis, at the head of their little band, worked down toward the open spot across which the rush must be made. These movements caused more or less exposure and drew repeated fusillades from the blockhouse. Most of the bullets passed over the heads of the attackers, but occasionally one slapped against the soft face of a rock, or scurried through the gravel. One glanced near Curtis' head and hummed like a musical top. He turned and looked curiously in the direction of the sound. "It takes yust one good, big battle to break a man of that," observed the Lieutenant. "Of what?" "Looking after the bullets. They sing all sorts of tunes, and sometimes they only whisper, but they always say the same thing--death, death."