nding him with dust, and occasionally
peppering him pretty smartly with the pebbles and fragments of stone
that were mingled with the earth of which his battery was composed.
Still he gallantly maintained the unequal fight, and actually succeeded
in disabling four out of the six guns ere a splinter of shell struck him
on the temple and knocked him senseless. When he recovered, he found
that darkness was closing down; that he was in his own room and on his
own bed, whither he had been brought by an ambulance party of his men;
and that Mama Faquita, poor Senorita Isolda's nurse, had taken him in
charge, cleaned and dressed his wound, and was looking after him
generally. An intermittent crackle of rifle fire told him that the
attack was still being pressed, but Faquita informed him that there had
been very few serious casualties thus far, and that all was going well.
The old woman would fain have kept him confined to his room; but Jack
knew that with the darkness would come the real danger, and despite his
nurse's vehement protests he not only rose from his bed, but returned to
the spot which his contingent of men were still defending.

Arrived there, he soon found that events had been happening during his
absence. In the first place, it appeared that the remainder of the
gun's crew had continued to work the twelve-pounder, and, after firing
away a perfectly ruinous quantity of ammunition, had actually succeeded
in disabling one of the two remaining Spanish guns; soon after
accomplishing which feat, the twelve-pounder itself had been dismounted
and put out of action by a shell which had completely destroyed the
carriage and at the same time had slain four of the gunners. Whereupon
a little party of sharpshooters, remembering the tactics that Jack had
adopted during the previous attack upon the estate, had exclusively
devoted themselves to a repetition of them, by first of all
exterminating the entire crew of the remaining Spanish gun, and then
rendering it impossible for anyone else to approach the gun to work it.
Meanwhile, the officer in command, finding it useless to try to do
anything with his men, exposed as they were upon the open plain, had
withdrawn them out of gunshot and gone into camp. It was clear that he
proposed to wait until the darkness came to veil his movements.

Jack quite anticipated that the first thing which the Spaniards would
attempt would be to reconnoitre the entire position, with the object