Part 50 (1/2)
”'Bon,' I say, 'me, I make my excuse to retire.'
”Then Henri Beck he laugh and say, 'Hop it, frog!' And that is all he has find time to say, when crack! spat! Bien droit he has it--tenez, mon capitaine--here, over the left eye!... Like a beef surprise he go over, cras.h.!.+ thump! And like a beef that dies, the air bellows out from his big lungs----”
Picquet looked down at the dead comrade in a sort of weary compa.s.sion for such stupidity.
”--So he pa.s.s, this ros-biff G.o.ddam Johnbull.... Me, I roll him in there.... Je ne sais pas pourquoi.... Then I put out the fire and leave.”
Quintana let his sneering glance rest on the dead a moment, and his thin lip curled immemorial contempt for the Anglo-Saxon.
Then he divested himself of the basket-pack which he had stolen from the Fry boy.
”Alors,” he said calmly, ”it has been Mike Clinch who shoot my frien'
Beck. Bien.”
He threw a cartridge into the breech of his rifle, adjusted his ammunition belt _en bandouliere_, carelessly.
Then, in a quiet voice: ”My frien' Picquet, the time has now arrive when it become ver' necessary that we go from here away. Donc--I shall now go kill me my frien' Mike Clinch.”
Picquet, unastonished, gave him a heavy, bovine look of inquiry.
Quintana said softly: ”Me, I have enough already of this d.a.m.n woods. Why shall we starve here when there lies our path?” He pointed north; his arm remained outstretched for a while.
”Clinch, he is there,” growled Picquet.
”Also our path, l'ami Henri.... And, behind us, they hunt us now with _dogs_.”
Picquet bared his big white teeth in fierce surprise. ”Dogs?” he repeated with a sort of snarl.
”That is how they now hunt us, my frien'--like they hunt the hare in the Cote d'Or.... Me, I shall now reconnoitre--_that_ way!” And he looked where he was pointing, into the north--with smouldering eyes. Then he turned calmly to Picquet: ”An' you, l'ami?”
”At orders, mon capitaine.”
”C'est bien. Venez.”
They walked leisurely forward with rifles shouldered, following the hard ridge out across a vast and flooded land where the bark of trees glimmered with wet mosses.
After a quarter of a mile the ridge broadened and split into two, one hog-back branching northeast! They, however, continued north.
About twenty minutes later Picquet, creeping along on Quintana's left, and some sixty yards distant, discovered something moving in the woods beyond, and fired at it. Instantly two unseen rifles spoke from the woods ahead. Picquet was jerked clear around, lost his balance and nearly fell. Blood was spurting from his right arm, between elbow and shoulder.
He tried to lift and level his rifle; his arm collapsed and dangled broken and powerless; his rifle clattered to the forest floor.
For a moment he stood there in plain view, dumb, deathly white; then he began screaming with fury while the big, soft-nosed bullets came streaming in all around him. His broken arm was. .h.i.t again. His screaming ceased; he dragged out his big clasp-knife with his left hand and started running toward the shooting.
As he ran, his mangled arm flopping like a broken wing, Byron Hastings stepped out from behind a tree and coolly shot him down at close quarters.
Then Quintana's rifle exploded twice very quickly, and the Hastings boy stumbled sideways and fell sprawling. He managed to rise to his knees again; he even was trying to stand up when Quintana, taking his time, deliberately began to empty his magazine into the boy, riddling him limb and body and head.
Down once more, he still moved his arms. Sid Hone reached out from behind a fallen log to grasp the dying lad's ankle and draw him into shelter, but Quintana reloaded swiftly and smashed Hone's left hand with the first shot.
Then Jim Hastings, kneeling behind a bunch of juniper, fired a high-velocity bullet into the tree behind which Quintana stood; but before he could fire again Quintana's shot in reply came ripping through the juniper and tore a ghastly hole in the calf of his left leg, striking a blow that knocked young Hastings flat and paralysed as a dead flounder.