Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/178

 He had overflown again the men on the ground and, climbing once more, he got view of the crest of the slope. It was gray! Gray-clad men were swarming all over it; gray—Germans! Brown men battled them; bayonets glinted in the sun; the brown men dropped; gray men toppled, too; but there were more of the gray all about. How they had got up there, Gerry could not tell; they might be some of those in the waves at which he had fired and who had gone on; they might be a different battalion which had charged in from the flank. They were there; they had taken the hill; they were slaying the last of the English. Gerry saw the swirls of the brown and gray where a few survivors, surrounded, were fighting hand to hand to the last. He forced down the nose of his machine and dropped at them; he let go one burst of bullets into the gray; let go another and now, as he pulled on his lanyard, the airscrew before him whirled clear; the jets did not project through it; his machine guns were silent; their ammunition was spent.

He had a mad impulse, when he realized this, to swerve lower and make himself and his machine a mighty projectile to scythe those German heads with the edges of his wings; he could kill—he was calculating, in one of those flashes which consume no reckonable time, the number of gray men he could hope to kill. Ten or a dozen, at most; and he had just slain—and therefore again that day might slay—a hundred. But that instinct did not decide him. Among the gray men, in the only groups upon which he could thus drop, were brown men, so with his free hand he pulled out his automatic pistol and, as he