But few natives had been met, and these had fled precipitately. Dr. Fox pressed on up the hill, aided by the _Laird’s_ search-light, which lighted up the path ahead of him, made still more slippery and treacherous by the heavy rain now falling. Urged to his utmost exertions by the knowledge that he and his men were urgently wanted, he scrambled on, stumbling every now and then over the bodies of dead Chinamen and over rifles which had been thrown away in their flight, and now lay scattered in great numbers on the path. At last he came out into the open in front of the breastworks, and feeble cheers greeted him from the remnants of the defenders. The search-lights of the ships lighted up the whole of that charred open space below the crest, and hundreds of prostrate bodies dotted it, thickly piled, literally in heaps, where the Maxims had swept them down in their last mad rush, their yellow faces horrible in the beams of the light. Right up to the sand-bags they lay, giving proof of the fierceness of their charge, whilst the dark eyes and haggard, drawn faces of the marines and bluejackets behind the breast-work showed only too plainly the terrible struggle they had made to defend it. Cummins came forward with blanched, anxious face, his left arm bound across his chest. "Thank God! you’re come. Poor Richardson was killed three hours ago, and we have thirty men wanting you." The worn-out defenders had roused themselves for a minute or two to welcome their comrades, but then lay down exhausted, and, with all danger past, fell asleep immediately, drenched though they were by the bitter cold rain which swept moaning across the plateau. Nobody on that bleak hilltop will ever forget the night which followed. The men were too utterly wearied to carry down the wounded, even if this had been possible. No one thought of leaving the dead unguarded, so the fifty men whom Dr. Fox had brought hastily pulled down the Log Redoubt which Captain Williams had maintained so stoutly, and with the timber made two bonfires under the lee of the gun-pit parapet. By their light and that of the search-light Dr. Fox dressed the wounded who hobbled stiffly over from where they had fallen, or were carried to him. The dead, too, were collected, reverently laid together, and covered with the big tarpaulin from the Krupp gun—Captain Hunter, Dr. Richardson, eleven marines, the signalman who had been the first to fall, the sick-berth steward who had been killed with Dr. Richardson during that fight round the gun, whilst trying to protect the wounded, and five blue-jackets. The Commander resolutely refused aid till the last, and when his turn came Dr. Fox found that he had a terrible gash on the left shoulder—from a cutlass—cutting clean down to the collar-bone and shoulder-blade, and his arm was quite helpless. "Another inch, and you would have bled to death," said Dr. Fox grimly. "The bones saved you."