He looked
along his gun, adjusted it, and re-adjusted it to a hair's breadth. The
enemy's bullets pattered upon it: still he adjusted it delicately. His
men were groaning and tearing their hair inside at his danger.
At last it was levelled to his mind, and then his movements were as
quick as they had hitherto been slow. In a moment he stood erect in the
half-fencing attitude of a gunner, and his linstock at the touch-hole:
a huge tongue of flame, a volume of smoke, a roar, and the iron
thunderbolt was on its way, and the colonel walked haughtily but rapidly
back to the trenches; for in all this no bravado. He was there to make a
shot; not to throw a chance of life away watching the effect.
Ten thousand eyes did that for him.
Both French and Prussians risked their own lives craning out to see
what a colonel in full uniform was doing under fire from a whole line
of forts, and what would be his fate; but when he fired the gun their
curiosity left the man and followed the iron thunderbolt.
For two seconds all was uncertain; the ball was travelling.
Tom gave a rear like a wild horse, his protruding muzzle went up
sky-high, then was seen no more, and a ring of old iron and a clatter of
fragments was heard on the top of the bastion.
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