Immediately a young recruit on the right, hearing the report, and longing to have a shot at the enemy, brought his rifle up to the "ready," took careful aim, and fired. Nothing is so contagious as contagion. In five minutes the whole line were taking pot-shots at the black figures on the sky-line. In vain did the captain and his two lieutenants curse and threaten the men nearest them; in vain did the non-commissioned officers urge their men forward--it was impossible to do anything. The men were all over the place, some of them a hundred or more yards apart, some lying down behind boulders taking aim, others running forward a few paces, and then discharging their rifles from the cover afforded by bushes or rocks. As they gradually worked their way upwards, the tribesmen's good shooting began to take effect. First one man dropped, then another; then one of the lieutenants threw up his hands and fell forward, shot through the heart in the act of kicking a man who was having a little private nigger-shooting competition with his corporal. As the men saw their comrades fall they got more and more chary of exposing their own persons, preferring to lie low and waste ammunition on the sky-line. Pitter-patter went the bullets on the stone-strewn hill-side, and the soldiers crawled a little closer up to their sheltering rocks and bent their heads down a few inches lower. There was not a man there whom you could have called a coward with impunity. Had they been all together--in line or column--they would have gone up the hill like a herd of buffaloes, with wild cheers and gleaming bayonets, and never given a thought to the dead and wounded. But, scattered as they were over the whole hill-side, with only now and then a comrade's white sun-helmet coming in sight, it was too much to expect of any man with a loaded magazine and clear view of the enemy that he should go on up, alone for all he knew, with the bullets singing around him. In vain had Captain Trevor called the men nearest him a pack of white-livered curs; in vain had he referred to their parents and antecedents in terms that would have shocked and astonished his eminently respectable aunt, the Dowager-Countess of Trevordine. At last he gave it up in despair. "Lie there, you infernal idiots, and blaze your ammunition away. I'll be cursed if _I_ stand and score for you!" And, fuming with impotent rage, he returned his sword to its scabbard with a vicious click, placed his hands in his pockets, and continued the ascent alone. "Just as if 'e was goin' on a Halpclimbin' hexpedition," as one of the men remarked. "'E'll git a bloomin' 'ole knocked in his carcuse afore 'e's gone fur," Big Bob yelled to the man nearest him, as he refilled his magazine and settled his elbows preparatory to wasting more cartridges. [Illustration: "ONE OF THE LIEUTENANTS THREW UP HIS HANDS AND FELL FORWARD."]