Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/352

 dropped that precious water-can in front of her.

The next moment he was hauling and tearing at the overturned cartridge-boxes. At first, as she looked up and saw his hollow and exultant eyes, she thought he had lost his reason, that pain and fatigue and hunger had left him hopelessly mad. But as she watched his struggles she knew there was a method in them.

For he was dragging and hauling the heavy boxes into a line directly before the overturned car. Then, with a railway-spike and a musket-end, he pried the tops from those boxes which came most readily apart, and poured the dross and cartridges out, in one heap. Then he flung the end of a broken car-step to the girl.

"Quick" he commanded, kicking a box towards her. "Fill these with sand!"

She did as he ordered, scooping up the yellow sand with the fragment of flat iron, while he dragged more cartridge-boxes from the car-wreck and built up a little three-sided wall about the spot where she dug. His movements, at times, took him beyond the bulwark of the overturned car, and each time he thus exposed himself the man from the Guariqui housetop sniped at him, calmly and viciously.

"This is our only chance," he hurriedly explained, as he ducked irritably back out of fire and tugged and hauled and lifted at his boxes.