CHAPTER XXVIII
THE COUNTER-FORCES
McKinnon's cry of thankfulness was cut short by an exclamation from the girl at his side as the car rocked and swayed along the uneven pier-track.
"Look!" she gasped. "They are closing the gates ahead of us! They are shutting us in!"
McKinnon peered through the darkness. He could see a number of moving lights; they shifted about through the gloom, small and restless, like fire-flies. He could also make out the shadowy lines of a building or two. Where the track ran between these buildings, at the end of the pier, a white-painted wooden gate had been swung and locked across the rails to stop the car. He could see the light from the restlessly moving lanterns refracted from its painted slats, from the swords of the officers and the rifles of the waiting soldiers.
He knew what it meant, but it was too late for half-measures. With the quickness of thought he jerked down two of the heavy cartridge-boxes, to the left side of the driving- seat, as a barricade against a chance bullet. He felt sure it would be only a chance bullet; his contempt for both the arms and the marksmanship of the Latin-American was of long standing. He hauled and twisted and rolled two boxes as quickly down on the right-hand end of the driving-seat, calling to the girl at his side to crouch down between his knees as he reached out and took the speed-lever in his own hand.
Alicia had instinctively slowed down the car, for the moving lights were now not more than two hundred feet before them. McKinnon, with his foot held ready on the brakes, threw the motor out to full speed. He no longer felt afraid of the flimsy wooden gate. What he feared was a tie across the track or a switch thrown open to derail him. And any moment, he felt, as the heavy car gathered speed and once more hurled itself forward, they would start shooting at him with their pot-metal rifles.
He crouched lower and lower between his barricade of boxes as the car swung in toward the shadowy pier-end, so that his stooping body forced the girl to the very floor of the driving-seat. He saw a red tongue or two of flame dart out of the blackness ahead of him, and he knew that the firing had begun. He could hear the whine of the bullets as they passed overhead; he could hear the lead ping and pound against the car-sides. He had little fear for the boxes of ammunition surrounding him; the cartridges were covered enough by the powdered fluxing-slag to be cushioned against concussion. Once, indeed, a bullet splintered against the wood of the very box against which he leaned. He held his breath and waited, racking and swinging onward toward the moving lights.
But still the firing kept up. The white-painted gate before him seemed a mirage, which receded as he advanced. It seemed that he would never get to it. And he knew what a bullet might do at any moment. He carried no lights, and he felt certain that as yet the men attacking him had nothing against which to centralise their fire. But as he came closer, he knew that this advantage would be lost. Then it suddenly occurred to him that a show of resistance would be a possible help to him. He had no time to feel for one of the carbines that still lay somewhere about the bottom of the car. But his groping fingers found the revolver on the car-seat cushion behind them.
Before his arm could go up, however, he knew that it was too late. The fire was pouring in on them broadside; he could hear the whistle of the bullets and the splintering of the car-hood sides. He had ridden down the lights and the waiting men.
The stabbing and jetting and drifting powder smoke obscured the gate so that they were upon it before he knew it. There was a second rending and snapping of wood, a vision of flying white pickets, a cry from the soldiers on either side of him. But the car had passed its second barrier, carrying away one end of the framework across its battered lamps.
McKinnon took a deep breath and waited with his foot still on the brake, oppressed by the terror of a sudden derailment. But the great car kept to the tracks and went thundering in between the shadowy buildings that mercifully shut them off from the grilling rifle-fire of DeBrigard's men. He knew, by the passing of the thunderous echo, that they were in the open again, circling up through the scattering lines of mud huts. The sound of a shot or two still came to his ears. He could feel the girl move; she was trying to rise to the seat. But he held her there between his knees as the car continued to plunge and sway along the crooked tracks. Now and then the howling of dogs came to his ears, breaking through the continuous monotone of the wind's rush past his face, straining and peering into the darkness ahead. Far out in the roadstead the Laminian's siren was still bellowing and roaring. An answering steam-whistle, somewhere in the east, took up the stentorian complaint; lights began to appear in the houses of the wakened town.
Alicia, still pinned down by his knees, was struggling and calling to him. He knew that she was safe, that she was still unharmed, and that was all he cared to know.
"Hurry!" she called to him.
"Yes," he answered, leaning closer to catch her words.
"We circle about the town," she was calling into his ear. "We've have to come out by Point Asuncion, next to the new hospital. There will be guards there. They can cross from the pier-end almost as soon as we can circle around!"
"It's out to the last notch," McKinnon explained, and she had to steady herself in the reeling car by suddenly catching at his arm.
"They'll try to stop us there!" she called out to him once more.
"They can't!" he called back recklessly, almost drunkenly, for the speed of their escape seemed to have gone to his head. "They can't!"
He suddenly forced her down to her former position, between his sheltering knees, for his straining eyes had once more caught sight of moving lanterns ahead.
The girl was right! They had passed through the heart of the town, and were once more on its ragged outskirts. They were following a little embankment of made land, of a filled-in swamp-side, littered with cinders and scrap-iron. McKinnon could see the oily glimmer of water beneath him, to the right. To the left, the ghostlike chimney and walls of a power house floated past, and were lost behind them, as the car rumbled over a culvert and ground and bit with its wheel-flanges on the curve that took them sweeping in again toward Point Asuncion. But all the while his eyes were on the moving lights ahead.
Suddenly he uttered a startled cry, a cry that had more resentment than fear in it. Then he stood up in his seat, reaching back for one of the carbines as he rose. For the drifting and shifting lights had defined themselves. He had made out the meaning of the movement that he had to face.
It was a body of uniformed men carrying a bridge-girder of iron. And he knew that girder was meant to stop his flight. His last doubt as to his enemy's intention disappeared with the sudden pinging of a rifle-bullet through the darkness above him.
He ducked low as he heard the sound, and brought his carbine into play. Throwing the old-fashioned magazine-lever down and back, he took quick but careful aim at the moving lanterns, light by light. It was not until his magazine was empty that he dropped the weapon and caught up his revolver. His shots were going wild, he knew, but he did not stop. He saw the moving lights come to a halt, almost beside the track-edge. He saw one of them go down and scatter, and the oil break into flames. He saw the remaining lights waver, draw back, and disperse. And the girder fell as the men wavered and retreated. But it did not fall on the rails.
He swept past where it lay beside the burning oil, six good feet from the track. He heard the hasty volley they tried to pour in on him, broadside, as he went. But they had nothing more than a racing shadow for a target, and the car had thundered past before they could make a second move. He felt the girl clasping his knee; whether from fright or weakness or gratitude at their deliverance he could not tell. Nor did he care to ask as he helped her up into the seat.
They were clear of the town now, and in the open country. A long level stretch of swampland, musky-smelling, miasmal, blanketed with a feverous night-mist, stretched before them. McKinnon knew that no courier could overtake them. He remembered that no wires ran from Puerto Locombia inland, that the coast was cut off from the hinterland, that they were comparatively safe until they had climbed the Height of Land and Guariqui itself came in sight. Then there would be the Liberal army's lines to run, De Brigard's sentinels to pass. Then, if all went well, their journey would be at an end. Getting into Guariqui would mean one last risk and one last fight; but in the meantime they were safe.
He lessened the mad speed of the car a little, wondering, for the first time, if they carried enough gasoline to see them to their journey's end. The more he thought over that problem of gasoline supply the more it disturbed him. With his tank once empty they would be stranded in a hostile country, in which there would be no hiding, from which there could be no escape. The mere terrifying thought of such a contingency caused him to throw out the speed-lever a notch or two. He noticed, as they plunged on and on through the quietness of the night, that his hands were cut and scratched, that his face was caked with dried blood, that his body was sore and stiff. But deep with in him was a persistent and unquenchable glow of exhilaration, something more than mere speed-drunkenness and mere thankfulness for delivery from past dangers.
It was the world-old and primordial joy in accomplishment, the intoxication of conquest implanted in him by a thousand fighting ancestors. And he felt at his side the tired and overtaxed body of the woman for whom he was battling; and as she swayed there with the swaying of the car, letting her weight fall against his shoulder and then recede from it, this feeling that might have been nothing more than pagan exultation was touched and transformed into something higher. The air beat against their faces, side by side; nocturnal moths flattened against their clothing and were held there by the wind.
McKinnon could see that they were beginning to climb, now that the swamp-land had been left behind, and that leaves and palm-fronds were rustling on either side of them. The air seemed to grow clearer, the darkness less abysmal. He could see that they were at last on the edge of the banana-belt, still climbing and pounding and swaying upward. Their path was now a lonely aisle through the forest of rustling greenery that crowded up to the very track-edge; sometimes a leaf swept the car-roof. At times they could hear the ripple of water in the irrigation ditches. Once a light swung across the track, a mile ahead. It brought the lever out to full speed again, and a carbine ready, and the two figures in the car lower down behind their barricade. A voice shouted to them, petulantly, out of the darkness as they swept past, but that was all.
They were grinding and screeching on a curve again, before McKinnon could lessen the speed. As they swept around the sharp quarter-circle, the car descended on what must have been a grazing burro or a steer. The heavy framework shuddered with the force of the impact; there was an animal-like sound, half-groan, half-grunt, as the obstructing black mass was thrown aside. McKinnon felt a spurt of blood flung up in his face, and the next moment held his breath, for he knew they had sped out on a cobweb of steel that bridged the cañonlike bed of a river. But still they kept on, up and up, until the gradient began to tell on the motor and the air grew perceptibly cooler. Forest trees were about them now, and they could hear the startled call of birds and the cry of monkeys. Once a jaguar called out through the night, and once, as they swept past a sleeping village of little white huts, they saw the glow of coals in an open mud oven.
But still the flying wheels carried them up and up until they could see behind them the vague glimmer of the Caribbean, and the starlight grew so clear that McKinnon could make out the woman's locked hands in her lap at his side. He felt her shiver with the cold, and forced her to drink a little of the liquor from his brandy-flask. Then he groped about, looking for a covering, for he knew that as the altititude grew greater the cold would increase. Under the seat-cushions he found an oilskin coat, and helped her into it. The coat was much too large for her, but he doubled it over, in front, and held it in with a cushion-strap about her waist.
He noticed, for the first time, that they were both hatless. And as he began to feel the penetrating chill creep into his own bones, he swallowed a mouthful of brandy and buttoned his coat close up to his throat. But they were still racing on, up and up toward the Cordilleras. And he thanked what gods he thought were watching over him that the gasoline had held out, and that the car had kept to its tracks.
A cluster of three or four lights showed ahead, on their left, and brought a little cry from the girl.
"That's Paraiso!" she called out to him. "The road divides here. We must take the track to the right."
"That means a switch!" called McKinnon, slowing down.
"We have to circle Paraiso Hill," she explained. Then she stood up, with her hand on his shoulder, and peered ahead through the darkness.
"And on the other side of Paraiso Hill is Guariqui," she said.
It startled him to see that she was crying a little, for no accountable reason, as she sat back in her seat at his side.