Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/177

 fighter who never comes to do his own fighting. He's the man who sucks his living out of a blinded and ignorant people's gun-wounds."

"She lies!" declared Ganley, blinking up at McKinnon indifferently, as though to note the effect of her words on him.

"He drugs these simple-minded people with war talk and blinds them with the glitter of a little gilt braid," went on the woman, with increasing bitterness. "Then he turns and robs them. And there he is, the colleague, the intimado you have found, the man who made a tool of Juan Parra and murdered him or had him murdered in the swamps of the Magdalena, the man who was given twelve hours to make his way out of Brazil, the man that even Zelaya refused to stand by. He is the upholder of the weak who shipped twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition into Locombia, embedded in lard, and twenty-eight hundred carbines crated and invoiced as laundry equipment, and nine cases of dynamite that went out of Mobile as land fertiliser for the Costa Rican coffee plantations."

The man in the raincoat, who had been squatting contemptuously on the berth-edge, swung forward to his feet at this. His many-lined, heavy, red face had lost its colour until it remained only a faded brick-dust tint.

"You see!" cried the woman more