The failure had steadied him.  The second pair of shots killed their men.  He heard the quick cry of pain and shivered.  He was new to this work and the cry hurt him.  But he picked up his express and fired again, and again there was a cry and a fall.  Then he heard a word of command and the sound of men creeping in the side of the nullah.  Eye and ear were marvelously acute at the moment, for he picked out the scouts and killed them.  Then he loaded his rifles and waited.

He saw a man in the half-light not five yards below him.  He fired and the man dropped, but he had used his rifle and the great spattering of earth showed his whereabouts.  Now was the time for keen eye and steady arm.  The enemy had halted thirty yards off and beneath the slope there was a patch of darkness.  He kept one eye on this, for it might contain a man.  He fixed his attention on a ray of moonlight which fell across the floor of the gully.  When a man crept past this he shot, and he rarely failed.

Then a command was given and the column came forward at the double.  He fired two shots, but the advance continued.  They passed the ray of light and he saw the whites of their eyes and the gleam of teeth and steel.  They paused a second to fire a volley, and a storm of shot rattled about him.  He had stepped back into his shelter, and was unscathed, but when he looked out he saw the enemy at the foot of the slope.  His weapons were all loaded except the express, and in mad haste he sent shot after shot into the ranks.  The fire halted them, and for a second they were on the edge of a panic.  This unknown destruction coming out of the darkness was terrifying to the stoutest hearts.  All the while there was wrath behind them.  This stopping of the advance column was throwing the whole force into confusion.  Angry messages came up from the centre, and distracted officers cursed their native guides.

Meanwhile Lewis was something wholly unlike himself, a maddened creature with every sense on the alert, drinking in the glory of the fight.  He husbanded the chances of his life with generous parsimony.  Every chance meant some minutes’ delay and every delay a new link of safety for the north.  His cartridges were getting near an end, but there still remained the stones and his pistol and the power of his arm hand to hand.

Suddenly came a second volley which all but killed him, bullets glancing on all sides of him and scraping the rocks with a horrid message of death.  Then on the heels of it came a charge up the slope.  The turn had come for the last expedient.  He rushed to the stone and with the strength of madness rooted it from its foundations.  It wavered for a second, and then with a cloud of earth and gravel it plunged downwards.  A second and it had ploughed its way with a sickening grinding sound into the ranks of the men below.  There was one wild scream of terror, and then a retreat, a flight, almost a panic.