Page:The world set free.djvu/210

 a very bad light," said the man at the door, peering in. "Have you no electric light here?"

Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so Pestovitch sprang forward. "Get out of my barn!" he cried, and drove the fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea that so he might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongs pierced him and drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound of feet running across the yard.

"Bombs!" cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the force of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the two new-comers.

The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. "Bombs!" he repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his electric torch full upon the face of the king. "Shoot them!" he cried, coughing and spitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king's head danced about.

For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the king kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The old fox looked at them sideways—snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb