Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/366

 "I know!" she answered, moving closer, so that her body touched his.

But the line she looked out on was not the same line that McKinnon had last seen. It had shifted and wheeled, in an inexplicable side-movement. It had crumpled and twisted up on itself, like leaves caught and tossed in a wind-eddy.

Then a cry burst from her throat, a cry of sheer joy, and she caught at McKinnon's arm.

"Look!" she said, with a sob.

For swinging about the track-curve were two flat-cars. Mounted on these cars she could see glimmering and burnished machine-guns. And behind these guns stood cheering and shouting bluejackets, stabbing the air with adder-like tongues of flame as the spinning chambers were discharged and the puffing locomotive pushed them slowly upward along the narrow track.

They seemed little more than boys, those quick-moving and bright-eyed jackies. They were shouting with the foolish joy and pride of youth at the thought of its first baptism of fire. They seemed like an excursion of madmen to McKinnon. He wondered what they meant, where they came from. But he could not give them much thought. He had other things to think of—for a wounded Locombian, a little brown-faced demon with a long-barrelled