In the course of half an hour passed in this agreeable manner, the men fell readily enough into the ranks, and proceeded in a rollicking, spirited manner towards the position assigned us in the forthcoming engagement. We had hardly taken up our post in the bend of the road that led to the Observatory, when the continued booming of Captain Hall’s guns told us the enemy were disembarking. Shortly afterwards they could be espied feeling their way through the brushwood that led up the valley. In approaching the cross-road that wound its way towards Wineberg they divided their forces. One party--the police--took the road; the other--the regulars--continued their way through the scrubby brushwood. They advanced but slowly, taking all due precautions, probing the ground right and left, with an advance and a rear guard. The police, on the contrary, came up the dusty road in a most disorderly, unhesitating manner--looking like a swarm of blue-bottles on a white, smoking, Cambridge sausage. This was setting such a bad example to my recruits that I determined to give them a profitable lesson; so, calling in the outposts, I prepared to meet them suddenly with the whole force at my disposal. On they heedlessly came to the bend of the road, when they found themselves confronted by an impassable barrier of prickly cactus, that I had hastily strewn there. They evidently thought this a warning of approaching danger, for, hastily unslinging their carbines, they prepared for action. But I left them no time for this ceremonious proceeding. The order to fire was given, and these brave but misguided invaders received such a peppering discharge from both sides of the road that the error of their ways became pungently manifest; and, without the slightest demur, they wriggled their bent forms into the smallest possible shape, and bolted in the opposite direction. But my men were most anxious to prove their capacity for far harder fighting than the evanescent police force allowed them to display; so, with loud shouts and exulting halloos, they jumped up from behind the fence which had hitherto concealed them, and started off in pursuit of the scuttling foe. Many a long itching grudge was feelingly rubbed off that day upon the heads of the police. Happy Jack was particularly conspicuous, as, with tucked-up sleeves, he laid the butt of his rifle (much to my dread of its breaking) upon the heads and shoulders of his natural enemies, in a manner quite uncalled for by the stricken. But there is a turn in the tide of events which, taken at the flood, makes one at times feel somewhat giddy as it whirls us round. This dizzying ebb of fortune ran counter to Happy Jack, and threw him on his beam-ends in the most reckless fashion.