Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/367

, was crawling towards him on a broken thigh, taking pot-shots as he came. And McKinnon knew he had to hold that man off, and it worried him to think that he had only a revolver to do it with. But he fired and reloaded and fired, leaning out over his wall-top and hurling half-delirious imprecations into the smoke-hung air. He fought on, to the last, like a man in a dream. All the world, to him, had become a chaotic pit of contending spirits who clamoured for his blood.

Then he was stirred and disturbed by the sudden scream of the girl at his side. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance; it smote on his ear thinly, as though heard through a wall.

"You're wounded!" she cried, foolishly, hysterically. He denied it, indifferently, and wondered why he was no longer standing beside his cartridge-boxes. He saw her white and smoke-streaked face bent over his arm and heard her repeated cry of alarm as she tore away a part of his ragged shirt-sleeve. He could see her fingers, when she lifted them; they were wet, and dark-red in colour. Then he knew that she was tearing some part of her dress, that she was binding and twisting a strip of linen about his arm, somewhere below the left shoulder.