Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/327

 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.