Confused shouts and cries followed. Then a bugle blared, and the
next instant the rattle and bang of musketry split the air.
Together with a knot of others, who like himself had run forth half
dressed, Mahony stopped and waited, in extreme anxiety; and, while he
stood, the stars went out, one by one, as though a finger-tip touched
them. The diggers' response to the volley of the attacking party was
easily distinguished: it was a dropping fire, and sounded like a thin
hail-shower after a peal of thunder. Within half an hour all was over:
the barricade had fallen, to cheers and laughter from the military; the
rebel flag was torn down; huts and tents inside the enclosure were going
up in flames.
Towards six o'clock, just as the December sun, huge and fiery, thrust
the edge of its globe above the horizon, a number of onlookers ran up
the slope to all that was left of the ill-fated stockade. On the dust,
bloodstains, now set hard as scabs, traced the route by which a wretched
procession of prisoners had been marched to the Camp gaol. Behind the
demolished barrier huts smouldered as heaps of blackened embers; and the
ground was strewn with stark forms, which lay about--some twenty or
thirty of them--in grotesque attitudes. Some sprawled with outstretched
arms, their sightless eyes seeming to fix the pale azure of the sky;
others were hunched and huddled in a last convulsion. And in the course
of his fruitless search for friend and brother, an old instinct
reasserted itself in Mahony: kneeling down he began swiftly and
dexterously to examine the prostrate bodies.
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