With his head pounding, MacKim found it hard to sleep. Although the Rangers had built themselves a string of small redoubts, using the felled trees for shelter and adding a few stolen fascines and sandbags to plug any gaps, they knew that a hit from a Spanish cannonball could splinter their defences. They lay uneasily as the artillerymen shouted orders to one another, and El Morro fired the occasional shot to disrupt the besieger’s work.
“If I were the Spanish commander,” Kennedy said, joining MacKim in his post, “I’d send out a raiding party tonight.”
Both men blinked through eyes that were red-rimmed and irritated with powder smoke.
“We’ll watch in shifts,” MacKim said. “The gunners will be tired after yesterday.”
With four hours on and four hours off, the Rangers endured the night,
