Back and forth across the line of fire he hurried, throwing water on the fluttering, dazzling flares till all were dead and cold.
"The window, mes amis, look to the window! Shoot if you see faces!" he ordered as he fought the dying fire.
Both Pemberton and I looked up as he called out, and I felt a sudden tightening in my throat as my eyes came level with the window. Framed in the panes were three faces, two malignant, brown and scowling, one a sun-burned white, but no less savage. The dark men I remembered instantly. It was they who stood beside the train the day the knife was thrown to kill the man who shared the seat with me. But the frowning, cursing white man was a stranger.
Even as I looked I saw one of the brown men draw his hand back and caught the glimmer of a poised knife-blade. I raised my pistol and squeezed hard upon the trigger, but the mechanism jammed, and I realized the knife-man had me at his mercy.
But Pemberton' s small weapon answered to his pressure, and the stream of bullets crashed against the glass, sent it shattering in fragments, and bored straight through the scowling countenances, making little sharp-edged pits in them like those a stream of sprinkled water makes when turned upon damp clay, except that where these little pock-marks showed there spread a smear of crimson.
There was something almost comic in the look of pained surprize the faces showed as the storm of bullets swept across them. Almost, it seemed to me, they voiced a protest at an unexpected trick; as though they'd come to witness an amusing spectacle, only to discover that the joke was turned on them, and they had no relish for the role of victim.
Yes, it's Ritter, all right," Pemberton pronounced as we turned the bodies over in the light of an electric torch. "Of course, he was a filthy rotter and all that, but—hang it all, it's tough to know you have a kinsman's blood upon your hands, even if"
"Parbleu; tu parles, mon ami!—you've said it!" cried de Grandin in delight.
