Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/342

 of the car, for he knew they were charging down on De Brigard's camp. He realised that their climacteric moment was at hand, that the time for their last dash across the enemy's lines had come.

Already he could see the pacing sentries as they met and countermarched between the scattered splashes of white. He could see the corraled horses and mules of De Brigard's cavalry feeding together. As the car raced on, he could even make out groups of men in ragged uniform, barefooted, squatting about the camp-fires.

Some of them he could see stooping quietly over black pots; one group was splashing and washing at a long wooden water-trough. There seemed something tranquil in the scene, something strangely unlike the way of war in the slowly rising smoke columns, in the slowly moving barefooted men, in the ranchos of palm and tree-boughs, in the water-trough and the tranquilly feeding horses and mules.

Then the scene changed, with the quickness of a stage-picture. The cue for that change came with a challenge from a sentry and then a single rifle-shot from a second sentry on guard further along the track-edge. The camp changed with that shot.

It seemed to McKinnon like the sudden