CHAPTER XXXII
THE LAST STAND
Alicia was busy tying a strip of linen skirt into a cap for McKinnon's head, to protect him from the sun, when the firing began again.
It was not general, at first. It was more the spasmodic and desultory pizzicato of sound which foretells the readiness of the waiting orchestra. It began quietly, as a storm begins, yet there seemed little that was ominous about it. The listening girl wondered, as De Brigard's outposts worked their way closer and closer in towards the creek-bed, if she had not become half -inured to the tumult of musketry.
McKinnon, watching at the embrasure, conceded them any territory that lay beyond the creek-brink. It was wasting time and powder, he knew, to attempt to hold them back from that little stream-bottom. He only too poignantly realised the limitations of his short-barrelled rifles of "Belgian Damascus." He was not altogether unfamiliar with that particular make of arm. They were weapons which only too often left the detonation of thirty grains of powder a peril and converted bullet-trajectories into a thing of ever—changing wonder. But he had shown Alicia how to reload each of these rifles. He had also taught her the trick of dislodging a shell when it jammed—for many of the cartridges, after their sea-trip, were still damp and swollen.
But beyond the wavering line of that creek-bank, he determined, no man should advance unchallenged. Above all things, he knew, he had to keep his front clear.
"It's ten to one they won't come at us in force," he explained to the girl crouched at his knees in the rifle-pit. "They won't throw themselves on us until they know what we carry. But we've got to stop that first rush!"
It was a minute or two before she spoke, for a flurry of bullets came whistling and whimpering and quavering close in over their heads. One or two, McKinnon noticed, chugged ominously against the face of his sand—boxes. But most of them went high, foolishly high.
"Couldn't I get to Guariqui?" the girl was asking. "Couldn't I—with a white flag of some sort, to warn them?"
"These devils 'd never let you get twenty feet away. And it would do no good!"
"Why?" she asked.
"They’re helpless in there .... they've no ammunition!"
She compelled herself to calmness again.
"But surely they’ll know .... surely .... in time," she murmured.
"Yes, they'll know!" he answered, absently, for his squinting eyes were on the undulating sweep of open ground ahead of him. He could see little barefooted men in ragged denim uniforms, creeping and running from hollow to hollow, spreading out in an irregular line, like the fan-edge of a breaking side-swell.
"They're coming ... keep low!" he said. And as he spoke he sighted and fired.
The response to that first fire of his was prompt, almost instantaneous. It brought a steady crescendo clatter of sound and a patter and throb of bullets against the pit—front.
McKinnon swung the emptied rifle back into the hands of the waiting girl and caught up its mate, with one movement of his body.
He was firing calmly and deliberately now, watching for each upthrust shoulder and advancing head as it rose above the dip of the creek-bottom.
Then the heads began to show thicker and faster, and it left him no time for deliberation. He pumped the lever and fired until his arms ached. He chose his man and emptied his shell until the powder-smoke hung thick and acrid about the little rifle-pit, until his face was streaked and smutted with it, as though it had been lampblacked. He fired until his eyes smarted with the drifting fumes and his lungs ached with their stench. He fired until a sickening smell of scorching oil rose from the metal of his rifles and the empty shells littered the pit-bottom.
But in the end he held the dodging and shifting little denim-clad figures in check, puzzled by the fury of his fire. He swept his appointed ground clear. He allowed no worming and skulking rifleman to advance even twenty paces beyond the creek-bank.
They drew back under cover, bewildered, wondering how many men that overturned car could have held. The staccato of sound dwindled down to a sulky and intermittent dribble of reports. McKinnon saw it, with a shout of gratitude, for he knew that he had reached his utmost limit.
He staggered back to gulp down great swallows of tepid water from the gasoline-can which the girl was holding up for him. Then he helped her reload, and waited for the smoke to lift.
"Have they gone?" she asked.
"No," he told her, as he swung up to his embrasure again. "But they've found out just what they've got to face!"
"What will they do?"
"It looks as though they're going to try different tactics now. They'll take their time, after this, and try to grill us out. Don't give way, please! Don't imagine"
But he did not stop to finish, for he braced his smoke~blackened shoulders and fired, and peered forward, and fired again, and still again.
"They think they can dishearten us, now, with sniping," he told her. "It'll be a waiting game, I'm afraid .... but you mustn't give way!”
The pallor of her face had disturbed and worried him. But what was disturbing him more was the thought that they might at any time bring up a field-gun, and end his last and only hope.
It was this fear that clung to him, and took the marrow out of his courage, and made the long, hot hours of mid-day seem purgatorial in their endlessness. But still he watched and sighted and fired, and reloaded, and fired again, grimly, doggedly, pertinaciously, giving them a counter-challenge for every challenge they sent in to him.
Then mid-day lengthened into afternoon, and a disturbing weakness descended upon him. So he leaned against his embrasure and chewed milk-tablets, and fired when he saw a moving shadow to target into, or a threatening gun-arm to aim at, and made the white-faced girl eat her portion of the milk-tablets and drink the last of the brandy-and-water.
And as he watched the afternoon grew older, and the sun swung lower over Guariqui. But still he fired and reloaded and wondered if the Princeton had steamed into Puerto Locombia, and silently and devoutly prayed for help.
Then all thought of prayer went from his mind, for his squinting eyes had fallen on what looked like a salt-barrel as it appeared over the brink of the creek-bank, a ludicrous and unlooked-for thing of staves and hoops.
McKinnon watched this barrel, in wonder, for it seemed to shift about by itself. Then it began to roll slowly forward. It advanced towards the rifle-pit, inch by inch, propelled by no visible human hand. It moved ponderously onward, foot by foot, as though it had been endowed with some miraculous power of locomotion.
Then it came to a stop, on a barren "hog-back," high above the ground that surrounded it. But even before the betraying black finger of a rife-end appeared cautiously and slowly above one corner of it, McKinnon knew it was a blind, a moving shelter. He knew it was a barrel filled with sand, a roughly improvised ambuscade being pushed forward by some intrepid sharp shooter from De Brigard's camp.
The man in the rifle-pit watched that barrel, uneasily, frowningly, firing maliciously at it, from time to time, as it advanced and stopped and delivered its whistling challenge of lead and still again crawled onward. It seemed a thing to fear and hate, like some venomous and loathsome dinosaurian reptile armoured against attack. Then the man watching it schooled himself to calmness, and fired more deliberately, studying his sight and range and trajectory, feeling his way about that incongruous and reptilious enemy with a hissing antenna of lead.
When the rifle-end showed again McKinnon fired, as calmly and judiciously as before, but this time three inches to the right of the rifle-end and the fraction of an inch lower.
He had the satisfaction of beholding a pair of hands thrown up in the air, wide apart, and of knowing that the rifle had fallen to the ground. Beyond that there was no sign. But the sand-barrel did not move again.
Then, as he watched with heavy eyes, he caught sight of a figure on horseback, circling out from what must have been the most southerly edge of De Brigard's camp to the higher stretch of the creek-back. He saw the horseman stop, gesticulate, and apparently give orders. Then he swung about again, and circled out of sight. But five minutes after he had done so a second line of infantry detoured from the coppice-screened fringes of the camp and crept in towards the men who had earlier in the day taken their position along the creek-bed. Each man, McKinnon saw, carried a rifle. And again he wondered if the Princeton had reached Puerto Locombia, and again he secretly and desperately prayed that help would still come to them. Then he called to the girl at his side.
"They're going to try to rush us!" he explained to her, very quietly. But he found it hard to say to her just what he wanted to say.
"Can they?" she asked; her faith in him, now, was blind and unreasoning.
"Well, they'll pay for it!" was all he had the heart to say, as he swung his reloaded rifle up to the dusty wall-top.
He did not speak again, for there was no time for it. He was firing now, quickly and yet dispassionately. He caught up one gun after the other and poured his fire into the shifting and advancing shadows cut out with cameo-like clearness in the full afternoon sunlight. He kept firing, feverishly, and yet almost unconcerndly, until the magazines were emptied and the barrels were too hot to hold. But he could no longer keep his ground clear. They were at last clearing the creek-bank, clearing it in swarms. They were finally overwhelming him, in sheer force of numbers.
Powder-smoke enveloped him. Dust and splinters flew about him. Runnels of sweat ran down his lean and grimy face. But still he kept firing, faster and faster, pouring his lead into the advancing line in a frenzy of hopelessness.
Then one of the guns jammed, irretrievably. He caught up the other, and emptied it, until the overheated steel scorched his shaking hand. But still the ragged and shouting line came on, unchecked. He had nothing but the revolvers to fall back on. So he snatched them and stood up to it, breast-high above the sand-box rampart in front of him.
"Come on, you cowards" he exulted, drunkenly, reelingly, as he faced and watched the spitting and snapping and ever-advancing line, for he knew it was the end. Then the girl dragged him down, while she reloaded, and caught up the third revolver and stood at his side, with her breast against a smoke-blackened cartridge-box.
"It's the end!" he said.
"I know!" she answered, moving closer, so that her body touched his.
But the line she looked out on was not the same line that McKinnon had last seen. It had shifted and wheeled, in an inexplicable side-movement. It had crumpled and twisted up on itself, like leaves caught and tossed in a wind-eddy.
Then a cry burst from her throat, a cry of sheer joy, and she caught at McKinnon's arm.
"Look!" she said, with a sob.
For swinging about the track-curve were two flat-cars. Mounted on these cars she could see glimmering and burnished machine-guns. And behind these guns stood cheering and shouting bluejackets, stabbing the air with adder-like tongues of flame as the spinning chambers were discharged and the puffing locomotive pushed them slowly upward along the narrow track.
They seemed little more than boys, those quick-moving and bright-eyed jackies. They were shouting with the foolish joy and pride of youth at the thought of its first baptism of fire. They seemed like an excursion of madmen to McKinnon. He wondered what they meant, where they came from. But he could not give them much thought. He had other things to think of—for a wounded Locombian, a little brown-faced demon with a long-barrelled magazine-rifle, was crawling towards him on a broken thigh, taking pot-shots as he came. And McKinnon knew he had to hold that man off, and it worried him to think that he had only a revolver to do it with. But he fired and reloaded and fired, leaning out over his wall-top and hurling half-delirious imprecations into the smoke-hung air. He fought on, to the last, like a man in a dream. All the world, to him, had become a chaotic pit of contending spirits who clamoured for his blood.
Then he was stirred and disturbed by the sudden scream of the girl at his side. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance; it smote on his ear thinly, as though heard through a wall.
"You're wounded!" she cried, foolishly, hysterically. He denied it, indifferently, and wondered why he was no longer standing beside his cartridge-boxes. He saw her white and smoke-streaked face bent over his arm and heard her repeated cry of alarm as she tore away a part of his ragged shirt-sleeve. He could see her fingers, when she lifted them; they were wet, and dark-red in colour. Then he knew that she was tearing some part of her dress, that she was binding and twisting a strip of linen about his arm, somewhere below the left shoulder.
She twisted and tightened it cruelly; but he was too tired to argue with her about it. He felt it would be best to humour her; she had had to endure so much for him. And it was rather pleasant, he told himself, having her fussing about him that way. But he wished she wouldn't cry and shake, and that he could explain to her how much he wanted to go to sleep. Then he was roused by more shouts and cries, and by a voice quite close to him, which said, in wonder: "Good God, he's a white man!" Then came more men, and a sudden order for someone to stand back.
McKinnon opened his eyes, wearily, and saw a yellow-faced stranger with a pointed gray beard. He wore a uniform like an officer's, and carried a sword from a red silk sash, a foolish and womanish-looking sash. Then came other men and other officers, and a thin and far-away babbling of voices, till the yellow sand where the car lay changed into a lake of swarming and crowding human beings, into a sea of little brown-faced jumping-jacks who shouted and contorted and flung foolish little red-striped army-caps up in the air, gibbering and arguing and calling, all the while, in some outlandish and incomprehensible tongue.
McKinnon neither knew nor cared what it meant. He only wanted to get somewhere where it was quiet, where he could rest in peace. Then the noise grew louder again, and a shouting and cheering column of bluejackets swung up, followed by a swarthy-skinned band of horsemen, with carbines, on prancing little Peruvian ponies. McKinnon could see that they were tearing his boxes open, that they were carrying away his precious ammunition.
He tried to fight against them, but he found himself held down, and through the drifting sand-dust he saw Alicia's white face bent low over him. Then somebody called out angrily: "Stand back there! Back!" and a huge hairy white hand tried to choke the breath of life out of his body by pouring what seemed liquid fire down his throat, from a leather-covered flask. This flask was quickly and mercifully knocked to one side, by an angry-faced man in white duck, who wore spectacles and said in perfect English: "Get the poor beggar into a fiacre!" Then there was the repeated cry of "Stand back!" and "To the Hospital!" and "No; to the Palace!" and the next moment hands were hauling and lifting at his tortured body. He felt, at times, that a woman was weeping somewhere beside him. But he could not be sure of this. He heard a thin and ghostlike pound of hoofs and a rumble of wheels. And that was all he could remember.