As Captain Hunter and his party, flushed with success and breathless with their exertions, swung into the plateau, a shrapnel burst above them, and the bullets, pouring down all round them, covered them with dust. A marine fell with a yell, his thigh smashed, but no one else was touched, and Hunter ran up to Cummins, who had now recovered his composure. He was simply mad with the physical joy of fighting, and this hailstone of shrapnel bullets had simply intoxicated him. "My country! that was a pretty bit of fighting," he roared; "worth ten years of ordinary life. I’ve got your oil, and we’ve brought every man Jack back again. There’s a man on the other side I’d like to shake hands with—after my own kidney, that chap—a huge fellow with a black beard; led ’em on time after time, but those skunks of Chinamen would not follow him." "He led the first rush," Cummins answered, trying to calm him, "and led it well, too. Have you lost many men, sir?" "What a brute I am!" he cried, the joy of battle quickly vanishing. "I don’t know exactly, but we’ve brought them all back. Before we came ashore I told my men that if anyone fell he should not be left, and—and they are splendid fellows, Cummins." The casualties were serious enough. Five had been killed—two of the destroyer’s and three of the _Strong Arm’s_—and eleven wounded—three of these belonging to Captain Williams’s party, three to the destroyer, and the other five to Hunter’s party. "That oil is worth a good deal now," said Cummins sadly. * * * * * Behind the gun-pit parapet Dr. Richardson busied himself with the wounded, a lieutenant of the _Strong Arm_, Gibbins by name, took charge of the gun in place of poor Pattison and commenced to fill the recoil cylinders, the less fatigued of the men carried on hauling sand-bags towards the edge overlooking the sea, whilst the remainder, thoroughly exhausted, lay down behind the breast-works. Shells were still coming from those field-guns, but the _Strong Arm’s_, reassured by the _Laird’s_, who had already begun to despise them, soon learnt that they were harmless so long as they kept down behind their sand-bags. Meanwhile preparations were being made to shell the hilltop from the guns of the cruiser which had been warped across the harbour. Her guns could not at first be elevated sufficiently to reach the top of the hill, but they were overcoming this difficulty by letting water into her on one side and giving her a list to starboard, and thus tilting her gun muzzles still farther upward. Hunter and Cummins were anxiously watching this operation—necessarily a slow one—and it was not completed before Gibbins rushed across to them and reported the Krupp ready for action. "We’ll weigh in first, old chap!" Hunter exclaimed with glee.