Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/112

 The foreigners spread out, fanwise, completely covering the way to the coast. They fired, and now with more effect, for the Tawareks, recklessly brave, were forced to expose themselves more or less in order to determine the movements of their antagonists.

Between shots the invaders would drop back a few yards, then again seek the convenient shelter of a dune and wait for the silhouette of a Tawarek turban above the sky line as a mark for their bullets. The Mausers kept up a continual chatter, fast and furious as the drum of a machine gun, and now and then neighbor would call to neighbor a jeering comment that was a delight to the soul of O'Rourke, for it showed him that he had chosen his men wisely—men who could laugh in the heat of battle.

He cheered them on himself, with the rifle of one of the fallen hugged close to his cheek; but now he found he had a double duty to perform—not alone to command but also to watch over the new-fledged emperor, by whose side the Irishman hung tenaciously.

As for le petit Lemercier, he was proving himself more of a man than any would have credited him with being; he laughed hysterically for the most part, it is true; but he kept his Mauser hot and the sands spraying up from the Tawarek's sheltering dunes. And to him, also, the heart of the Irishman warmed, as it always did to a ready fighter. Thus they fought on steadily, as steadily falling back; to O'Rourke it seemed as though the way were endless, and more than once he feared that they were going rather inland than toward the coast; but in the end the hiss and detonation of a rocket behind him proved that he had not erred in trusting to instinct.

He turned to watch the sputtering arc of sparks that lin-