By Naadi Ford

BY NAADI FORD

By G. B. LANCASTER

"UNDERSTAND," said Rags, in his best regimental manner, "it's a month hard, without the option of a fine, if you let those blighters by before I get back."

The Heads of the Garrison looked at one another, grinning. Dolly, as always, flew to the attack.

"I like that! Toby—Mr. Carruthers—we claim the right of option, don't we? As my husband, he'd have to pay my fine, you know."

The lieutenant of the R.E.'s, who was tinkering at an electric lamp in the corner, sucked the thumb which he had just pinched with the wire-nippers, and addressed such portions of Dolly's slim ankles and high-heeled slippers as he could see beyond the end of the cosy-corner seat. It was part of Dolly's charm for these men that she had imported Bond Street and other London echoes to this Sahara of an East Africa without any seeming effort or incongruity at all.

"He has been husbanding our resources for so long that he most distinctly ought to pay for the lot of us," he said solemnly.

"Oh, Toby, you dear fool! Rags, Rags, take Bezo out of that hamper—quick! It's full of ammunition——"

"Gracious Scot, Doll!" Captain the Hon. Reginald Lansing dislodged the inquiring fox-terrier with a hurried boot-tip. "What on earth——"

"—for the inner man—yes," ended Dolly placidly. "Cakes and things. I've been bribing Sergeant Harris. He has engaged to see that your morning egg is always boiled just so, Rags, and that you don't sleep in unaired sheets. He is going to be particularly careful about the last, for I told him that they always gave you cold feet."

"Last anxiety removed, by Jove!" Rags stretched his long, angular limbs in their stained and faded khaki, looked at Dolly out of his kind brown eyes for a fleeting instant, and strolled off to the window. "Did you tell him how to manage if we get served shells without eggs, or air without sheets, or ammunition without hampers? Carruthers, that eternal Blake will have his mule-pack top-side below for the fiftieth time inside of two ticks. Just go and show him how, will you?"

"Yes, sir," said the subaltern, departing, and Toby gathered up his lamp and its connecting wires with care.

"Harris is as clever as a woman. He'd always find some excuse," he said.

"Substitute, you mean," retorted Dolly.

"Same thing, to a woman's mind."

"Rags, he's beginning to bully me already! The position of Governor of Naadi Fort has gone to his head and bloated it. Rags, do you give me plenary powers of punishment over him, if necessary?"

"My dear girl, I promise to execute him the very moment I get back."

"Then I'll execute every one of your orders first, and you'll have none left to get me to the meat-block with," said Toby, and opened the door quickly in response to a knock. He turned, and, before he spoke, the brave jesting was dead.

"Sergeant reports all ready to move, sir," he said.

"Tell him I'll be there in two minutes," said Rags.

Then he heard the door shut softly behind Toby, and the room was still. The last cursing khaki figure and the last objecting mule disappeared round the corner of the house, and the tramped compound lay empty, except for two lean hens. Beyond the thorn zareba the track shouldered up into sight again to pierce the solid flank of jungle. It was just there, between day and dark, that he and Toby had caught the first gleam of home last night, after a stolen hour with the springbok on the plateau. Dolly had been standing at the window with the light behind her. He swung round.

"Doll!" he said.

She came to him quickly, leaning her head against him and stroking his cheek.

"It's all right—all right, lad," she said softly.

"If I—if we don't get back—and they come——"

"I know." She slid a hand into her dress and drew out a little Smith-Wesson revolver. "I'll keep it here all the time. And I won't let them take me, even if they take the ford and everything else. And—I'm not at all afraid, Rags, dear."

"Get Toby to show you, if there's anything you're not sure about. Ah, Doll!"

His sudden grip about her, and his lips on hers, brought silence to the room again. In the compound someone was shouting an order. On the door-panel someone tapped.

"Rags, old chap," said Toby warningly.

"Coming!" Rags bent to her again. "If this is the end, it's been a good year, hasn't it? Never can tell you—what you've been to me. Just the best ever. Good old girl! Good-bye—darling!"

His lips burnt hard on hers, and the strength of his arms left her breathless. Then he put her aside and ran out. It was no more than a minute before she followed; but already the uneasy stress of departure had merged into the rigid orderliness of a column under way, and the great mouse-grey and flea-bitten mules, with their sagging bundles or neatly-strapped machine-guns, were filing through the zareba gate. Three companies—stray units dropped by the last flotilla from India—swung steadily round the corner of the verandah, and a native, running out with Dolly's hamper, raised his arms and his voice in shrill expostulation. Harris, waiting for the call, fell out and doubled to the verandah.

"Take that there to Jimbi," he ordered. Then, in one breath to Dolly: "I'll kip an eye on him, ma'am; an' if you was as safe as he's goin' to be, you'd think you was back with the old reg'mint at Jeypore this blessed day, fer sure!"

"Oh, but, sergeant, you must let him have one German, or he'll be so disappointed," pleaded Dolly. And the old iron-hard soldier doubled back again, chuckling.

"The sperrit o' the Cap'n hisself, bless 'er eyes!" he told himself. And then, in loving retrospect of barrack days and a sick wife: "A rare couple they be, an' not too like to pull agin one swingle-tree again, worse luck!"

He proceeded to curse the War, the enemy, the heat, and the mules squealing at their unaccustomed garnishing, with a well-flavoured impartiality that brought ease, as the column trekked briskly up the steep track to meet the steaming shadows of the jungle. Rags twisted in the saddle to look down on the two white figures standing in the sprawling stone verandah, on the tall zareba walling them off from the world, on the slope behind that dropped to the ford and rose again into tumbled naked kopjes along the reeling sky-line. His smile was nailed resolutely to his mouth-corners, but his eyes were sad as a man's eyes may well be. It was such a bitterly small handful of brave hearts that he could leave down there to hold the ford until he should come back again.

Dolly watched unmoving while the last blur of dust laid itself back on the pale thread of road, and all the hollow, empty world grew still again. At the far end of the verandah Toby, superintending the division, under two Zulu boys, of a pile of gunny sacks to be utilised as sand-bags, was whistling a music-hall song which they had heard together in London two years ago. The absurd words galloped through her brain—

 

Hip, hip, hip—let her rip, uncle!
We'll show them what we are worth.
Let us make merry O! We'll challenge Bleriot
When we get back to the earth!

 

How many would be making merry at Home now? War there, too. Was there a place under Heaven where one could get away from it—a place where a woman could lose this sick, shuddering knowledge that everywhere, every minute, women's sons, women's husbands, were going out with steel at their belts and in their eyes, and on their faces such queer, silly, little smiles as Rags had? "Let us make merry O!" Rags would have been quite happy over this, if it hadn't been for her. And Toby? Her slight figure straightened up, and Toby, over his sack-counting, looked at her surreptitiously. Red mouth, shut so firmly that faint puckers showed on the soft skin; clear, steady eyes under the fine brows; dusky hair that sprang thickly until it was swept back over the right temple to meet the great knot up-rolled from the slim nape. Toby had looked at that little head and neck too often for his peace, long before Rags Lansing came and won her. But after the first reeling shock, he had met the situation and weathered it as a man must do, clinging pluckily to his old friendship for them both.

Besides, soon after the marriage Rags had trot his transfer to India. Then it was War and East Africa, and a half-company of R.E.'s sent up in all haste under himself to reinforce Rags's command. Now it was the very deuce and all—complications inland, where Rags had gone full pelt to stem a rising torrent as best he might; complications at some unspecified place coastward, which presently promised complications at the Naadi Ford. And all the time there was Dolly—a thrice-added complication. She had no right in this hell's business. That dear, gay-hearted perversity of hers had kicked over the traces once too often, and if ever a man had reason to go off with a very devil of misery on him, old Rags was that same. Toby dusted his hands together and came down the verandah. His lips whistled still, but his mind was concerned with Rags's last words to him. The house was a rotten apology for a fort. One decent shell would knock the stuffing out of it. The ford was drying, and a howitzer on the Old Man Kopje could make a good bid at controlling the whole outfit. If the Germans happened to want to trek this way, Toby did not know anything short of earthquakes which could stop them. But "To the last man and the last round of ammunition, Toby!" Rags had said. And he had answered: "To the last benighted one, old man! And then we'll go to glory with the butts." Not a word of Dolly there. Neither could trust themselves that far. "Hip, hip, hip—let her rip, uncle! We'll show them what we are worth." He pulled up beside Dolly and patted her shoulder. She did not move. "H-sh!" he said to the universe and the tailless parrot perched on the rail. "The mechanism will start ticking directly. 'A little patience, and patting her hair in papers, should work wonders.' Dolly, an' you love me——"

The shoulder removed itself from under his hand. Toby immediately applied the gentling process to the other.

"Dolly, an' you don't love me——"

She wheeled with a rueful smile and wet lashes.

"Imbecile!" she said, and Toby nodded at the parrot.

"When she's abusive, you can do almost anything with her—except wash clothes," he told it. "Dolly, I have nothing to sew those gunny sacks up with but a button-hook. If you have a needle about you—any kind of needle—it's needleless to say——"

"Stop it, or I'll give you bodkins!" she threatened, and whisked past him into the house. Toby's genial smile faded, and he shook his head at the parrot.

"A bare bodkin," he said. "‘When he himself can his quietus make'—and that's the devil of it. We've got to make the other chap's quietus, my tailless friend, and we haven't enough little pop-guns to do it with."

During the scant nine days which elapsed before the enemy came, Toby worked like ten men and those possessed. And the little half-company of sweating sun-blistered Engineers were, as Dolly asserted, no better. A few more or less sick Regulars, some veldt-scrapings of Basutos, Zulus, and other natives of sorts, filled up the garrison total, and surroundings gave them no aid. The earth was red powder and the grass tow, and rocks and stones burnt to the touch. Sapping was an impossibility valiantly overcome. Trench-making down the slope, among the fervid attentions of mosquitos, scorpions, and other small deer, almost banished speech when the puerility of it was admitted. Daily the river, elsewhere dangerous between tall banks, withered at the ford. Sand-spits, grim with driftwood and bleached bones, thrust up here and there among the swift yellow streams. The current shifted continuously; now sweeping out a carefully-laid mine from the ramp of the further shore; now jamming an uprooted tree-monster into a narrow gut, and shamelessly exposing below the dammed space an ingenious wire entanglement: now subsiding into a gleaming quicksand, which drowned a Basuto, and moved Toby to visible wrath. For it was a struggle of men against time these days, and every one counted.

After keen deliberation and two wakeful nights, Rags and Toby had decided on the only plan of action which had a chance. By machine-guns—two, sniping, and luck, the bald head of Old Man Kopje across the river must be kept inviolate as long as could be. Once the enemy succeeded in planting anything over a four-pounder there, the garrison must take to the casemates and dug-outs down the slope, which was sand-bagged and tunnelled into comparative safety. And after that the Deluge. "For the rest," said Toby, "a few fancy touches with barbed wire, one or two mines and some hand-made grenades, are about all we can do to give éclat to the proceedings."

Young Carruthers wiped his dripping face with a bloody hand. They were disposing the last fathom of wire in the scrub along the flanks of Old Man Kopje, and the sun, repeating a Biblical event, had indubitably stood overhead for an hour.

"If you'd only let me start a machine-gun stunt from the top," he said.

"Can't. They'd blow you straight to blazes. And guns are precious."

"A good spread of mines all down here——"

"Can't again. Not much more nitro-glycerine left than you could put in your eye, and I want that for grenades. There's a nigger coming like a loose windmill. Bet you he's spotted a buzzard's nest or a German."

It was a German, and Toby, climbing up with his glasses to reconnoitre, found more of them. On the yellow, uneven distance, reeling with heat, two small grey, scabby patches showed, one to north and one to the south.

"They'll join in that tall scrub behind Old Man," said Toby, sliding down again. "We may expect a call at daybreak. That's their sociable hour, I believe. I'm going home to put out the crochet tidies and the best teaspoons."

"I say"—Carruthers lingered a moment—"can't I bring Wells and Sothern up here to-night? Their sniping is a dream."

"Tell you later. Come on."

Into the next few hours the garrison put most of the work which it had calculated to get through in the next few days—with luck. Then a leisurely shot came over the hill, dropping half-way up the scarped slope, and told them that they were at war. There were pickets out now. Bice was somewhere across the river on to the end of a field-telephone. A change had come into the faces and the very ring of the feet as they passed in the courtyard. Dolly noted it, and shivered with a thrill of pride. She had been a tower of strength these days, preparing with Bails, the R.A.M.C. surgeon, for the terrible work which was coming—portioning out stores and clothing, ruling her household of scared native servants and heavy-handed convalescents, and finding time always to put on her prettiest frock for dinner, and fill a vase with flowers to set among her dainty dishes. But now for a moment she stood in the pantry with her hands pressed over her eyes. They were exulting grimly, these men, with latent fierceness stirring in them. It was their game—their game! And for her——

Toby was late for dinner on the night when the shot put an end to compliments, and he came in unchanged and cheerful.

"It's been a lovely day," he said, sitting down. "What's the immortal advice? 'Take a ham and see life.' Dolly, you are going to see life at last."

"While you take the ham," said Dolly, rescuing it. "Not if I know it. Let me cut it. You always hack your meat, like your pleasures, in lumps from the reeking joint. Did you do the same before I knew you?"

"Never had any pleasures before I knew you," said Toby elaborately.

Dolly turned to the subalterns.

"If one shot—and that not hitting him—can make him so brilliant, how he will confiscate under howitzer-fire!" she said admiringly.

"Skate—what? In a temperature of a hundred and twenty Fahr., and no ice, I object to references to skating. There was a time when tact was your strong suit, Dolly."

"There isn't a strong suit left in the place now," said Dolly. "I have mended them all—more than once."

She looked round laughing on the little company. Her colour was high and her eyes bright. Just what these days of preparation had meant to her the men could only guess. Carruthers, seeing her that afternoon making up beds in the shed set apart as a hospital, had gone away blind for the moment. Did she think of those battle-fields to which the flying column had gone, with naked earth beneath naked sky for a broken man's bed?

Like the crackling of bean-pods under noon-day sun, a sudden faint fusillade of rifle-fire whickered out and ceased. Before the sound died the room was empty, and Dolly was facing Rails in the door.

"Our first case, Mrs. Lansing," he said breathlessly. "Yes, rather nasty. If you think you could give me a hand——"

"My dear man," drawled Dolly, "what else do you imagine I came here for?" She smiled, but her half-closed eyes scintillated, and Rails followed in awed dismay.

"Good Heavens!" said his mind. "Good Heavens! She came to look after Lansing, of course, and he—— Well, thank the Powers, I'm not married!"

At the beginning Toby had made the garrison a little speech.

"Remember that every shot has got to count," he said. "To throw away ammunition is to throw away lives, and that's the plain English of it. And to throw away lives here is to mess up matters for the men who have gone inland, and who are probably already tackling a bigger proposition than we know. We've got to give them every chance we can by holding the ford as long as we can. Sit tight, freeze on to the business like limpets! That's all. Dismiss!"

Four days went by in a feverish nightmare tinged with the smell of powder and blood. The sun heaved up into a white-hot sky, turned brazen and brutal, staggered scarlet into the arms of night. Little things grew meaningless. Big things, awful, unspeakable things, came to be accepted in a strange calm. Death and agony marched with a high and glancing courage that was like lambent flame on a blade. It was a forlorn hope from the beginning; and they knew it, and jested at torment of heat and thirst and wounds, and died hard and as seldom as they could—always having in mind those men who had gone inland—and buried their dead in the jungle at night—when they retrieved them.

They forgot sleep these days—forgot life as it had been, and could not be again. In the scrub about the kopjes snipers crawled and shot, until suddenly they shot no more, and the wheeling buzzards told where they lay. By night the mists were torn by occasional flares or rifle-fire, and twice by the roar of a mine exploded by one who had crossed the ford to almost certain death. The river dropped lower, and in places the entanglements showed up in stark derision. Bice and Carruthers, with the machine-guns, enfiladed Old Man Kopje, until a stray shot smashed the breech of Bice's gun, and he and his men were picked off before they could take cover. Carruthers was ordered into the trenches after that, and when a six-pounder howitzer appeared from somewhere and took up position behind the chaos of an exploded mine on the further bank, the Heads of the Garrison knew that all was over bar shouting. The first three shots from the gun screamed into the jungle. The fourth blew a hole in the zareba, spattered shrapnel through the dining-room window, and killed a chicken. Toby, crossing the courtyard, looked round, grinning. He had washed for the first time in thirty hours, and the orderlies, passing with a groaning, Zulu on a stretcher, were suddenly struck with the aged look on his burnt and cheerful face. Toby's men loved him always. These had learned to worship him, and his laugh now put new vigour into their step.

"Not one of those insanitary accidents over there can shoot," he told Dolly, who came up with an armful of towels. "But as there is the chance that they may find out by mistake, we'd best get the wounded into the earth-shelters before the house takes fire. Tell Rails, will you?"

Dolly's trim figure was covered up in a big apron. Her sleeves were rolled back, and her capable, pretty hands roughened and stained. To the man she had never looked more beautiful, more a being to be reverenced and to die for. She had a little smut on her chin, too, and all her colour was gone, except from the bravely-smiling lips.

"Yes. How long now—before——" she asked.

Toby smiled back at her. In his sun-blackened face his teeth looked miraculously white. But his eyes were bloodshot and swelled, and in the clear light she saw the half-healed furrow made by a spent bullet where the neck joined the collar-bone.

"Just as long as we can make it, Doll," he answered. "We haven't got to die gloriously—we've got to die slow. We'll mop up as many as we can before the day comes, and we'll hope that old Rags will be ready for 'em when they're ready for him. Their tactics have been rotten, so far. But we're outnumbered by about ten to one, you know."

He went away whistling, and she stood a moment. Down the slope the intermittent crackle of rifle-fire went on. Back in the hospital a native was screaming in the high nasal note of terror and suffering. The boots of the orderlies grated on the stone verandah, and Rails was calling her. Again the whine of a shell passed overhead, and a muffled explosion came from the jungle. She had lately done and seen things which she thought no woman could have lived through. She had borne strain as one who has lost the power to feel or to tire. The smell of disinfectants and blood, the sight of drawn faces and eyes dull with pain, seemed the natural, the only environment as she hurried into the shed. Rails, in a stained apron, looked over at her, frowning.

"Here—quick, please!" he said imperatively; and she cast the towels on a chair and went to him.

It was the trenches and the curious penetrating odour of the earth after that, and the squeal of shrapnel and rifle-fire, and, out in the dazzling heat, the feathering of smoke above the scrub over the river. The enemy charged that day, and were met in the river among the wire entanglements and driven back. But it was the most costly business yet, and pools slimy with green weed bubbled red when the survivors regained the trenches under a dropping fire, and among the bleached driftwood on the spits grey and khaki lay tangled together.

Toby came dripping into the upper trenches at sunset; had a brief interview with Rails, which included the strapping of a bandage about his thigh and another over his left ear, and went along behind the parapet to find Dolly. She was rolling bandages in an angle between the sand-bags, and tossing them into a basket at her side. There was no agitation about her, no suggestion of weakness, but she worked like one at high tension. He had seen a man die in her arms last night, and heard the tenderness of her voice. But she was still the same wonderful Bond Street Dolly of Rags's delight. She glanced up at his coming, and a faint line showed between her dark brows.

"Sniper?" she asked.

"Yes." Toby felt his head. "Sheer carelessness."

He flung himself forward on the sand-bags, idly sighting through the loophole with a rifle that lay near. There was a man face down on the nearer bank with his heels in the water. No chance of bringing him in until dark. It looked something like Sothern—his best sniper, too.

"Quieter than we've had it since we began," he said presently, as a single shot cracked out over the river. "Know why?"

"You beat them off just now. I saw it."

She spoke almost angrily. He shrugged.

"That's not why. They were testing our strength, and—they know it now, my dear. They drew off—we didn't beat them. The last shot in the locker's gone, Dolly. They'll be all over us as soon as it's light enough to see the wire in the ford to-morrow morning. They have no fancy for being drowned in the dark. Besides, it isn't necessary."

She did not answer. He went on handling the rifle and whistling that old silly tune which brought flooding memories of light and laughter, of a music-hall stage, and Toby and Rags either side her in the stalls-

 

Let us be merry O!
We'll challenge Bleriot
When we get back to the earth! …

 

"Toby, don't!" she cried suddenly, and he raised his head and looked at her with curious, morose fire in his eyes.

"It's easy enough for a man to die when he's done his possible," he said, "but he loathes having a woman in a mess like this—loathes it!"

The light was growing faint now. Against the glimmer of a cloth someone had hung to dry she could just see the dark, hard angle of his jaw.

"Mind your own business," she said lightly. "Rags has arranged for me."

"So he told me." Toby turned to the loophole again. "You won't funk, of course. The men say you are the bravest thing that ever happened. That doesn't better it, though—you shouldn't be here."

"It's the greatest comfort of my life that I am here. I'm not frightened, Toby."

He laid his cheek against the rifle-stock, sighting at nothing.

"Conventionalities don't matter when one is up against a thing like this," he said presently. "I've always loved you, Doll, and I don't think Rags would mind my saying so now. I tried to ask you ever so often before he came along. Never could, somehow—scared of losing your friendship, I suppose. Then I knew I hadn't an earthly against Rags—whitest old chap ever stepped. Please don't be angry because I couldn't give up caring for you. I've never forgotten that you were his wife."

His voice was very quiet, but it gave her the sensation of more poignant suffering than anything in the hospital had done.

"Toby——" she said, then stopped, trembling.

"All right, old girl." Still he looked through the loophole. " Shouldn't have told you, perhaps. Sorry. But—through these days—every time I went out … Selfish of me, but I—wanted you to know. It can't hurt now!"

His voice failed. She was fumbling with her roll of bandages, and the dark was between them. In the utter silence she could hear his uneven breathing.

"Why did you tell me now, and not then?" she cried suddenly.

"Then?"

"Before—Rags asked me."

"Funked it," he said, with a short laugh. "Then I saw how right I had been. Best man won. And you weren't easy stakes, Doll."

"How right," she said, choking—"how right?"

He started, looked round, laid the rifle aside swiftly, and came up to her.

"Doll!" he said sharply.

"No, Toby. But how was I—how was I to know? You never—and I thought—I—you——"

The gasping voice sank to silence. For a little he stood beside her, motionless. Then he walked abruptly away, as though to leave her; stopped by the angle of the sand-bags, as though he had not the power. Down at the river frogs were croaking now. A faint sough of wind sounded through the jungle above. In the earthed-up casemate that was the hospital someone dropped a tin plate clattering on wood. Then all was still again.

"Toby!" said Dolly, very low. He did not move. "Toby, come here a minute."

He came, walking rapidly and unevenly. By a streak of light from a lantern outside the hospital she saw his eyes and the bandage round his head.

"What is it?" he said roughly. "It—can't be anything, you know."

"Rags would understand. I have never forgotten that I am his wife, either. But—it began before that. We're both going to die. We won't see each other again. Good-bye—Toby!"

He dropped on his knee, hiding his face against her shoulder. She sat still, with her hands among the bandages on her lap. Over the rounded top of the sand-bags stars were pricking up the purple sky. The rush of the distant river was fainter than the rush of their own young blood.

"Good-bye, Toby!" she said again. And then he raised his head, unspeaking. Dolly bent forward, with a hand on either shoulder, and kissed his lips.

Now—go!" she said, under her breath. And he went.

•••••

The attack was made just before dawn, while the silvering mystery of night still hushed the world and faint mist was fingering over the river and the scrub. The trench-watchers had their nerves tightened by every sway of fantastic tree shadows, every flop of a leaping fish, every rustle of little busy animals in the grass. And yet the sudden belching of fire, when it came, was unexpected, as the long-expected always is. Under cover of it followed the sliding splash of men into the water across the river, and Toby and Carruthers, crawling down from trench to trench, gave the final order: "Reserve fire till you can see them. Then all together. After that the bayonet!"

Completely silent, the little force took the water and waded across. Bullets whipped round them and sang overhead. Shrapnel burst continuously on the slope, but the zone of danger was now behind them. Vague and enormous the enemy shouldered out of the mist, met a sudden spitting crackle of fire and a hurled fury of roaring, cursing, bellowing men with the bayonet. For a moment they gave before the mad onslaught. But the impetus from behind was too heavy. Step by step the British were forced back, fighting in that delirium which descends on men in desperate straits, taking their business through grimly, hand to hand, thrusting, hacking, beating down, rolling in mud and water and snatching wire, staggering to their feet again and hewing with arms that seemed to be steel.

The mist drew off and the sun came up. Firing had ceased, and the battle at the ford was mere stark bloody horror and bestial wrath and savage courage. Toby had spent the last four inactive hours as a man does not care to spend many and live. Scouts sent into the jungle had reported no sign of Rags's return. The end of this was certain. A tall Zulu near him doubled up, like the black, shiny ball at pool, and went under the water. These German devils had no fear of the bayonet, but how they yelled when our fellows drove them into the quicksand! Young Carruthers was laughing beside him.

"Isn't it beastly hot?" he said, and shook the sweat out of his eyes. Then he leaped forward, and Toby was on a sand-spit among the white, crackling limbs of dead trees, and a German was clinging stupidly to the edge of it as a man does to an overturned boat. Had Rags made good up there? Was the ford held long enough for strategical purposes? All about his knees water ran red now, and the odour of stirred-up green slime, where dead things lay, and of smoke and heated men, was filthy. The man next him had been eating onions, and his cursing was particularly foul. But he was a jewel with the bayonet. Toby would see that he was recommended. This was the way men fought in the Iliad beside their hollow ships. That tall chap in the round helmet was Hector of the glancing helmet. Toby reached for him, and he went over backwards. A man of straw was Hector! Carruthers was fighting like six. He, too, must be mentioned in dispatches. That fellow sitting in the water, with surprised eyes and his mouth full of driftweed, was like Guy Fawkes as the children carried him through Covent Garden on a Fifth of November …

On the bank now, and the dazzle of steel and of grey everywhere. And what a beastly thing mud is inside the boots! More grey swarming over Old Man Kopje, like mites in a cheese. The Basutos were fighting well. Devilish knives they had, too.

 

 

"We'll challenge Bleriot
When we get back to the earth."

 

Of course. All have wings, then, according to tradition. What a joke! Must tell Doll. And Doll was back there with the few derelicts who were waiting to pass in their checks—Doll with her London frocks and her Smith-Wesson. … "God!" said the man next him. "God!" and fell against his shoulder. Toby pushed him off. On the bank there was yet a momentary vantage over those in the river. But it could not last. The fellows came like fleas in an old dog. …

Something screeched thickly overhead, and, as from the muzzle of a giant hose, bullets swept across the flank of Old Man Kopje. Again, like the rush of wind, and Toby knew. A battery of mountain artillery had got into action somewhere up by the jungle, and the fort was saved. But whether this was to Rags's address or not he was too busy to stop and see. Thought was dead, for the present stress was too live. Then the struggling red-faced mass before him was rolled back by a wash of khaki and solar topees, and a tall officer was introducing himself while his men butchered along the bank in the sunlight.

"Lansing?" asked Toby.

"Here, with what's left of his men. We came across from Nairobi, and helped them wipe up that lot. How many over there?"

"Two thousand, perhaps. Can you——"

"Settle them in our stride. Bless you, yes!" The officer was gone, and Toby looked into Rags's eyes.

"Come along!" said Rags hilariously. "We'll be in at the death, old dear!"

"In at the death?" repeated Toby. "Oh, certainly! You'll be the better for a wash, too."

Across the river and up the slope they chased the scattering enemy. Over the crest of Old Man Kopje they lay flat to meet a fusillade from the tall scrub at the bottom. Rags was still at Toby's elbow, and the sun was a handful of red-hot spears, and men were cursing and laughing as they dragged a machine-gun up the yellow, slippery grass to the crest.

"I saw Doll for a moment as we came through," said Rags.

"Ah!" said Toby. "Did Harris boil your eggs properly?"

"Lost him the first day, poor chap. It's been touch and go here, Toby."

"Yes, touch and go. It—has to be that sometimes."

Suddenly he stood up, looking along the hillside. Rags snatched at his leg.

"Get down, you confounded idiot!" he shouted.

Toby spun round. Then he came, with a bullet through his head, and Rags caught him. There was a flicker of life still, and Rags bent close, speaking fast.

"Toby, is there a message? Any girl anywhere?"

"No," said Toby, and smiled.

Then he slid down easily into the baked grass, and came to rest on the earth, and lay quiet.

 

Copyright, 1915, by G. B. Lancaster, in the United States of America.

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.

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The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.