Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/311

 The pistol shots ceased. Calvin heard the gunmen's car maneuvering. Likely they had come to the edge of the ditch and were backing before making a turn. The shots came again, and the car was nearer; bullets struck into the ditch, but they were strays deflected from the frame of the car. Still nobody was hit, though more than two automatics must have been emptied.

The gunmen's car again drew alongside; maybe twenty feet away, Calvin's thought; and somebody put shots into the wreck, methodically once more, at spaces of about a foot from end to end. Throughout all this, the ditch had given no sign of life at all; so the gunmen's motor car halted; the shooting stopped; a door opened and somebody stepped down, his feet crunching the crusted snow. A gunman was coming, Calvin knew, revolver in hand to explore the ditch and make sure of his work.

"My gun," Neski demanded, "my  gun."

"Quiet!" gasped Calvin but knew that the voice was heard. Movement in the ditch also was to be heard; for the Royle girl was trying to crawl up between the rim of a door and the ice on the side of the slope. Calvin said no word to her, and she none to him. He thought that if she, being a girl, cried out for mercy they might tell her to crawl forth and might not kill her immediately; but she did not cry out, though the gunman crouched at the edge of the ditch. Instead of a cry from her, there roared a pistol; it roared and flashed again and again, as fast as a trigger could be pulled. The Royle girl fired it up at the form on the edge of the ditch in the moonlight; and the form toppled back.

Calvin's lungs filled with breath and his groping fingers clenched, ending their search for Neski's gun. The Royle girl had it.

Revolver shots, scarcely to be heard after the deafening noise under the car, spat from the machine in the field