e Su's outer
walls and about fifty feet beyond them. Suddenly I stopped and
dropped, quite by instinct, for although my mind had telegraphed the
danger to my knees, I did not fully realise what it was until I was on
the ground. Just round the corner there was a glimpse of three men
stripped to the waist to be seen. Had they seen me? I waited in some
suspense for a few seconds pressed my glasses back into their case,
and gripped my rifle. My anxiety was soon set at rest, for with a
clatter, which seemed ten times greater than it really was, the men
set quickly to work on a structure. They were building something, and
now was my chance. Getting to the corner again I peered cautiously
around, and there but seventy or eighty feet from where I lay three
strapping fellows were raising a heavy log. They had pulled off their
red and black tunics, and were only in their baggy breeches and the
curious little stomach apron the Northern Chinaman affects to keep
himself from catching cold.

Their brown backs glistened with sweat in the bright sunshine, and
between their belts and the loose black turbans, under which their
pigtails were gathered up, an ideal two-feet target presented itself.
Carefully I fired.

In a flash one broad brown back was suddenly splashed with red, a
fellow sank on his knees with outstretched arms, and at last rolled
over without a moan, apparently as dead as dead could be. It was
brutalising.

The log the men were carrying crashed down heavily on the ground and
the two remaining soldiers started back in surprise. From whence came
that shot? In front of where they were working lay their advanced
posts, which, facing our own, two or three hundred feet away, should
completely cover them. They peered around for a few minutes, anxiously
searching their front and not looking behind them. At last they
apparently decided that it must have been a stray shot, for, bending
down, they once more raised the log, paying no more attention to their
dead companion than they would to a dead dog.

This time I let them advance towards their outposts until they were a
hundred feet farther away. Then I fired again. The log came down once
more with a dull thud, and both the men fell as well. But imagine my
disgust when they both rose to their feet, one man merely showing the
other a snipped shoulder which must be bleeding, but was evidently
nothing as a wound. I cursed my government rifle, which always throws
to the right. A