The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 31
CHAPTER XXXI
THE LAST HOPE
McKinnon's fall seemed to shock him into new life. The very abruptness of his disaster brought with it a renewed appreciation of danger. His mind became alert again, with the peevish alertness of febrility, as though, like the long-taxed body, it were capable of coming into a sort of second-wind.
He realised what had happened, for he was thinking clearly and quickly now. He could see the whole thing, and see it only too well. De Brigard's men had had the forethought to break the one line of communication between Guariqui and the coast. This end had been achieved easily enough, by the mere uprooting of a few lengths of track. He had ridden into that open trap, without thought. He had demanded too much of Destiny. Luck had at last gone against him, as it must in the end go against every man who insists on taking his chances.
They were alone there, he and the girl he was trying to save, under the hot morning sun of an open and unprotected country. They were stranded on a slope of yellow ballast-sand, face to face with a guerilla army that would refuse them quarter, under the walls of a beleaguered city that would decline to admit them. Yes, he had asked too much of Fate. There was nothing left to him, now, but to fight it out, fight it out to a finish.
The next clearly defined thought that came to him was that he was burning with thirst. Before everything else, he felt, he must have water. And there remained only one hope of water. That was the little stream two hundred yards behind them, the flashing little ribbon of blue over which De Brigard's men would be swarming at any moment.
There was no time to be lost. His first task was to make his way to that stream and back—to fight his way there and back, if need be. He could not hold out, he knew, without water.
He dodged and peered and groped about the overturned car, in feverish search for anything that would hold water. That hurried search seemed a hopeless one, until his eyes fell on a battered gasoline-can of galvanised tin, stowed away under the seat-frame. He got the screw-top off its cover, in some way, and let its contents bubble out on the yellow sand as he swung about the car again. The moment he did so the sharp, complaining pinnnnng of a bullet sounded close over his head. It had come from the west, from Guariqui. Before he could dodge in under the far side of the car-body it was repeated, again, and still again. One of Duran's own men, he knew, was picking at him from a housetop.
He found the girl, as he dodged back into shelter, sitting against the floor of the overturned car. Her face was colourless, and her eyes unnaturally large.
"Is this the end?" she asked, as he caught up one of the carbines half-smothered in sand at her feet.
"The end?" he cried. "No, it’s not the end!"
"What can I do?" she asked.
"We've got to have water—and I'm going to get it! Keep close to that car until I get back!"
"But they'll cut you off; they'll"
He had not waited to hear her. He was running out across the open and undulating ground, bending low as he ran. She could easily follow his moving black shadow, in the glare of the open sunlight. She heard a scattering of rifle-shots further eastward as he crossed a stretch of higher ground. Then she saw him drop to his knee. Her first thought was that he was wounded. But the next moment she beheld him bring his rifle into action, and then run forward, and repeat the movement, and again run forward. Then he ducked lower, and rose again, and suddenly dropped down into the bed of the creek, completely out of sight.
He remained there for what seemed an interminable length of time to her. The vicious snapping and popping of the distant guns crept ominously closer, second by second. They would be on him, she felt, before he could escape. They would cut him off before he could even climb from the creek-bed.
Then, in the clear light, she saw his head emerge. She caught sight of him worming cautiously back, dodging and rounding into each land-depression. The gun-shots began again, until they became a rhythm of hollow sound, like quick and impatient hammer-pounds on a plank. She saw that he was wet to the knees, and breathing hard, as he stumbled back to the car.
Then, as she saw the wet and dripping can, all her being was centred on the thought of her own thirst, of how her dry throat ached and throbbed for water. She scarcely noticed that the firing had ceased, that the line of skulking and scattered figures had fallen mysteriously away. She only knew that McKinnon had dropped that precious water-can in front of her.
The next moment he was hauling and tearing at the overturned cartridge-boxes. At first, as she looked up and saw his hollow and exultant eyes, she thought he had lost his reason, that pain and fatigue and hunger had left him hopelessly mad. But as she watched his struggles she knew there was a method in them.
For he was dragging and hauling the heavy boxes into a line directly before the overturned car. Then, with a railway-spike and a musket-end, he pried the tops from those boxes which came most readily apart, and poured the dross and cartridges out, in one heap. Then he flung the end of a broken car-step to the girl.
"Quick" he commanded, kicking a box towards her. "Fill these with sand!"
She did as he ordered, scooping up the yellow sand with the fragment of flat iron, while he dragged more cartridge-boxes from the car-wreck and built up a little three-sided wall about the spot where she dug. His movements, at times, took him beyond the bulwark of the overturned car, and each time he thus exposed himself the man from the Guariqui housetop sniped at him, calmly and viciously.
"This is our only chance," he hurriedly explained, as he ducked irritably back out of fire and tugged and hauled and lifted at his boxes.
"Our chance for what?" she asked, as she worked.
"For holding out—for keeping them back—for saving this ammunition for Guariqui!"
He was now taking the boxes as she filled them, and piling them one above the other on the outside of his roughly built wall, as an armour-belt protection for his serried cartridge-cases. He was afraid of what a bullet at close range might do to those cartridges. And all the while, slowly and methodically, the Guariqui sharpshooter was picking at him, as he showed himself outside the shadow of the car-wreck.
"We can hold them off, I tell you!" McKinnon was exulting, as he left a narrow embrasure in his three—foot battlement, by pushing two of the boxes a few inches apart. "We've got a fort here! We're as safe as Guariqui is! They can't get in behind us, because Ulloa's men are waiting there, and they know it! They’ve got to come at us from the front! And we're safe behind this—it's as safe as a stone wall! And we've got ammunition—a ton of it, if we need it!”
He was hauling at more of the boxes, building his side-walls now.
One of the Guariqui sharpshooter's bullets whined in over his head, within a foot of where he worked. He swung about and shook his fist at his unseen enemy, irritably, impotently.
"You fool!" he cried. "You fool!—wasting powder on the people who're tryin' to save you!"
"We can’t save them!" said the woman, gray with dust, weak with hunger, sick with fear. But she worked on, mechanically, doggedly.
"We've got to!” exulted McKinnon, as he took the last box of sand. from her. "We've got to hold out until the Princeton lands her men and gets them up into the hills here! It's simply a matter of time! We can hold out here as well as in Guariqui! We're safe here! And we’ve got water!"
"But no food!" she said.
"Wait!" he cried again. "The chocolate! And the milk-tablets! It's enough! And here's brandy, see—half a cupful of brandy left!"
"But how long will that last?"
"It will last as long as we need it—until nightfall, anyway!" he declared, as he crawled back to the car and dragged the remaining rifle out from under the fallen boxes.
"But if the Princeton's men are not here by night?" she asked.
He seemed to resent her note of hopelessness.
"They will be here by night! They've got to be here! They should be at Puerto Locombia by five this afternoon. They'll commandeer a Fruit Concern locomotive from the roundhouse there, and be up here by sunset—before sunset!”
She forced herself to believe him. She struggled to catch at some shadow of his hopefulness.
"Then what more must I do, to help?" she asked, very quietly. He was peering out over the rolling and sun-steeped plain.
"Eat—we must eat before those devils start back at us!" he said, as he caught up the can of gasoline-tainted water and gulped at it, savagely, for the sun by this time was cruelly hot overhead. Then he dragged out his brandy-flask, diluted its contents, and made the girl drink from it.
"If that fool back there'd only stop wasting powder!" he cried, as a bullet splattered against a car-wheel behind them. "They won't understand who we are, back there, until they see De Brigard's men coming in closer and closer, or trying to rush us. They won't know we're friends until they see us holding that guerilla mob off!"
"It can't be long now,” said the girl, blinking out across the sun-steeped plain, where, in the distance, restless brown figures could be seen once more moving and dispersing and concealing themselves along the land-dips.
"Then we must eat, before they come," he answered, putting the broken and crumpled pieces of army-chocolate out between them. The milk-tablets he decided to save for a second meal. Then he loaded the rifles, and laid them out ready, and placed the three revolvers on a box-top, with his pocketful of cartridges close beside them.
And they sat there on the yellow sand of their little rifle-pit, breakfasting on brandy-and-water and unsweetened chocolate, while they waited for the enemy to come up.