Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/353

 "Our chance for what?" she asked, as she worked.

"For holding out—for keeping them back—for saving this ammunition for Guariqui!"

He was now taking the boxes as she filled them, and piling them one above the other on the outside of his roughly built wall, as an armour-belt protection for his serried cartridge-cases. He was afraid of what a bullet at close range might do to those cartridges. And all the while, slowly and methodically, the Guariqui sharpshooter was picking at him, as he showed himself outside the shadow of the car-wreck.

"We can hold them off, I tell you!" McKinnon was exulting, as he left a narrow embrasure in his three—foot battlement, by pushing two of the boxes a few inches apart. "We've got a fort here! We're as safe as Guariqui is! They can't get in behind us, because Ulloa's men are waiting there, and they know it! They’ve got to come at us from the front! And we're safe behind this—it's as safe as a stone wall! And we've got ammunition—a ton of it, if we need it!”

He was hauling at more of the boxes, building his side-walls now.

One of the Guariqui sharpshooter's bullets whined in over his head, within a foot of where