Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/343

 change that swept through his coherer-dust when vitalised with its magnetic current. The sentry, in the meantime, repeated the shot, three times, until the man in the charging car stood up and returned his fire, sharply, driving him to cover.

But the alarm had been given. The tree-clumps and the broken stone walls seemed to swarm with men; the white tents became strangely like hornets' nests disgorging excited occupants. The barefooted idlers grouped about the camp-fires no longer watched the pots and splashed about the water-trough. They became armed irregular infantry; they were suddenly transformed into a vindictive and resolute-minded company whose one purpose in life was to pour lead into a huge, rusted, bullet-riddled track-motor that had ridden down their sentries and broken into their very lines.

For one incongruous moment McKinnon had felt vaguely sorry for those lean and hungry-looking and unkempt idlers in dirty denim uniforms. He had thought of them as homeless and unhappy men who were being made the tools of forces which they could not comprehend. Now they seemed to him dancing and running brown-faced fiends, doing their best to put a bullet through the head of a stranger who was very tired and hungry, and a little tipsy,