Mrs. Hargreaves came out of her door with a basin of water and some linen torn into strips for bandages, just as the doctor ran in from the Sikh Square, where he had been attending to several casualties.
"That is right," he nodded to Mrs. Hargreaves; "this is a bad business, I fear."
"All hands to repair defences!" was now the order, and the boys followed Mr. Johnson outside.
"The scoundrels are busy this evening," he observed. "It sounds like a boiler-maker's shop" Dick said; "if only one in a hundred bullets were to hit, there would not be many alive by to-morrow morning."
"No, indeed," Mr. Johnson replied; "they are of course firing to some extent at random, but they aim at the points where they think it likely that we may be at work, and their fire adds greatly to our difficulty in setting right at night the damage they do in the daytime."
For the next four hours the lads were hard at work with the rest of the garrison. Earth was brought in sacks or baskets and piled up, stockades repaired, and fascines and gabions mended. The work would have been hard anywhere; on an August night in India it was exhausting. All the time that they were at work the bullets continued to fly thickly overhead, striking the wall of the house with a sharp crack, or burying themselves with a short thud in the earth. Round shot and shell at times crashed through the upper part of the house, which was uninhabited; while from the terraced roof, and from the battery in the corner of the garden, the crack of the defenders' rifles answered the enemy's fire.
By the time that the work was done it was midnight, and the Warreners' turn for guard. They had received rifles, and were posted with six others in the battery.
