Page:Armistice Day.djvu/408

386 Twing's heart. With proper care, Carson's wound would not be fatal. But, burning with fever, two hours under the morrow's sun would end in raving madness, and ghastly, searing death. Unless...

He cast a quick glance upward at the spreading, thickening canopy of cloud—the same over-spreading blackness that the leading files of the British column, lying among the rocks outside the pass were watching, as they awaited the supporting column.

"My word!" the speaker seemed to have uttered the exclamation without volition. "Lightning—and at this time of the year."

The words drew a sharply whispered reprimand from the nearest sergeant. But it drew the men's eyes aloft. And as they watched with an interest which deepened into wonder, the flash on the clouds was followed by a series of shorter ones, revolving themselves into the preliminary of a message, flashed by the shutter of a signal lamp.

The signalers among them read, repeating word by word the message dashed and dotted against the cloud-screened sky; a message the column heard with a rustle of amazed whisperings, which the officers did not think to stop. Slowly and evenly the dots and dashes followed each other in measured, ordered sequence, filling them with an emotion they could not have expressed in words.