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 by five this afternoon. They'll commandeer a Fruit Concern locomotive from the roundhouse there, and be up here by sunset—before sunset!”

She forced herself to believe him. She struggled to catch at some shadow of his hopefulness.

"Then what more must I do, to help?" she asked, very quietly. He was peering out over the rolling and sun-steeped plain.

"Eat—we must eat before those devils start back at us!" he said, as he caught up the can of gasoline-tainted water and gulped at it, savagely, for the sun by this time was cruelly hot overhead. Then he dragged out his brandy-flask, diluted its contents, and made the girl drink from it.

"If that fool back there'd only stop wasting powder!" he cried, as a bullet splattered against a car-wheel behind them. "They won't understand who we are, back there, until they see De Brigard's men coming in closer and closer, or trying to rush us. They won't know we're friends until they see us holding that guerilla mob off!"

"It can't be long now,” said the girl, blinking out across the sun-steeped plain, where, in the distance, restless brown figures could be