Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/363

 one corner of it, McKinnon knew it was a blind, a moving shelter. He knew it was a barrel filled with sand, a roughly improvised ambuscade being pushed forward by some intrepid sharp shooter from De Brigard's camp.

The man in the rifle-pit watched that barrel, uneasily, frowningly, firing maliciously at it, from time to time, as it advanced and stopped and delivered its whistling challenge of lead and still again crawled onward. It seemed a thing to fear and hate, like some venomous and loathsome dinosaurian reptile armoured against attack. Then the man watching it schooled himself to calmness, and fired more deliberately, studying his sight and range and trajectory, feeling his way about that incongruous and reptilious enemy with a hissing antenna of lead.

When the rifle-end showed again McKinnon fired, as calmly and judiciously as before, but this time three inches to the right of the rifle-end and the fraction of an inch lower.

He had the satisfaction of beholding a pair of hands thrown up in the air, wide apart, and of knowing that the rifle had fallen to the ground. Beyond that there was no sign. But the sand-barrel did not move again.

Then, as he watched with heavy eyes, he caught sight of a figure on horseback, circling out from what must have been the most