The air was thick with hurtling globes.

Cocoanuts rained upon the company, tempestuously, as though an invisible palm were shaken by a hurricane.
Among them flew sticks, jagged lumps of sun-dried clay, thick scales of plaster.
"Aow!" cried Nesbit, "the bloomin' coolies!" First to recover, he skipped about, fielding and hurling back cocoanuts.
A small but raging phalanx crowded the gap in the wall, throwing continually, howling, and exhorting one another to rush in.
"A riot!" cried Heywood, and started, sword in hand.

"Come on, stop 'em!" But it was Nesbit who, wrenching a pair of loose bottles from the path, brandishing them aloft like clubs, and shouting the unseemly battle-cries of a street-fighter, led the white men into this deadly breach.

At the first shock, the rioters broke and scattered, fled round corners of the wall, crashed through bamboos, went leaping across paddy-fields toward the river.

The tumult--except for lonely howls in the distance--ended as quickly as it had risen.