The Last Shot Part 38

"A pair of anarchists!" exclaimed Stransky grinning, and tried a shot for another head.

As if in answer to prayer, a gunner had come out of the earth.

Sufficient to the need was the fact. It was not for Dellarme to ask questions of a prize-medallist graduate of the school for officers in a blue blouse and crownless straw hat. His expert survey a.s.sured him that before another rush the enemy had certain preparations to make. He might give his fighting smile a recess and permit himself a few minutes'

relaxation. Looking around to ascertain what damage had been done to the house and grounds, he became aware of Marta's presence for the first time.

"Miss Galland, you--you weren't there during the fighting?" he cried as he ran toward her.

"Yes," she said rather faintly.

"If I had known that I should have been scared to death!"

"But I was safe behind the pillar," she explained. "Your company did its work splendidly," she added, looking at him with eyes dull and wondering.

"Do you think so? They _are_ splendid, my men! They make one try to be worthy of them. Thank you!" he said, blus.h.i.+ng with pleasure. "But, Miss Galland, please--there's no firing now, but any minute----."

"Yes?"

He did not attempt masculine firmness this time, only boyish pleading and a sort of younger-brother camaraderie.

"Miss Galland, you're such a good soldier--please--and I'm sure you have not had your breakfast, and all good soldiers never neglect their rations, not at the beginning of a war! Miss Galland, please--." Yes, as he meant it, please be a good fellow.

She could not resist smiling at the charming manner of his plea. She felt weak and strange--a little dizzy. Besides, her mother's voice now came from the doorway and then her mother's hand was pressing her arm.

"Marta, if you remain out here, I shall!" announced Mrs. Galland.

"I was just coming in," said Marta.

Dellarme, his cap held before him in the jaunty fas.h.i.+on of officers, bowed, his face beaming his happiness at her decision.

As they entered the dining-room Marta saw that the sh.e.l.l which had entered the window had burst just over the heavy mahogany table and a fragment of the jacket had cut a long scar in the rich fibre. She paused, her breath coming and going hotly. She felt the smarting pain of a file drawn over the skin. The table was very old; for generations it had been a family treasure. As a child she had loved its polished surface and revered its ma.s.sive solidity.

"Oh! Oh! Somebody ought to be made to pay for such wickedness!" she exclaimed wrathfully.

"It will plane down and it is nothing we could help, Marta," said Mrs.

Galland. "Fortunately, all the portraits were out of the room."

"Mother, you--you are just a little too philosophical!" complained Marta.

"Come!" Mrs. Galland slipped her hand into Marta's. "Two women can't fight both armies. Come! I prescribe hot coffee It is waiting; and, do you know, I find a meal in the kitchen very cosey."

Being human and not a heroine fed on lotos blossoms, and being exhausted and also hungry, when she was seated at table, with Minna adroitly urging her, Marta ate with the relish of little Peterkin in the sh.e.l.l crater munching biscuits from his haversack.

XXVII

HAND TO HAND

With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of irony.

An hour or more of intermittent firing pa.s.sed in the suspense of listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of sh.e.l.l fire broke and continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.

"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.

At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms.

Abruptly as the inferno of the guns had commenced, it ceased, and the steady, pa.s.sionate, desperate blasts of the rifles, now uninterrupted, were more deadly and venomous if less shocking to the ear.

The movement of the minute-hand on the clock-face became uncanny and merciless to her eye in its deliberate regularity. Dellarme had been told to hold on until noon, she knew. Was he still smiling? Was Feller still happy in playing a stream of lead from the automatic? Was the second charge of the Grays, which must have come to close quarters when the guns went silent, going to succeed?

The rifle-fire died down suddenly and she heard a cheer like that of the morning, only wilder and fiercer and even less human. Could it be from the Browns celebrating a repulse? Or from the Grays after taking the position? What did it matter? If the Grays had won there was an end to the agony so far as her mother and herself were concerned--an end to murder on the lawn and devastation of their property. But, at length, the rifle-fire beginning again in a slow, irregular pulse told her that the Browns had held.

Now another long intermission. The demon was wiping his brow and recovering his breath, Marta thought; he was repairing damaged joints in his armor and removing the flesh of victims from his claws. But he would not rest long, for the war was young--exactly one day old--and many battalions of victims remained unslain.

How slowly the big hand of the clock kept hitching on from minute-mark to minute-mark! Yet no more slowly than the hands of clocks in distant provinces of the Browns or of the Grays, where this day was as quiet and peaceful as any other day.

Mrs. Galland had settled down conscientiously to play solitaire, a favorite pastime of hers; but she failed to win, as she complained to Marta, because of her stupid way this morning of missing the combination cards.

"I really believe I need new gla.s.ses," she declared.

"Let me help you," said Marta. Welcome idea! Why hadn't she thought of it before? It was something to do.

"But, Marta--there you are, covering up the jack of spades, the very card I need--though it will not help now. I've lost again!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland at length. "Why, Marta, you miss worse than I do!"

"Do I? Do I?" asked Marta in blank surprise and irritation. "Please let me try once alone. I'll not miss this time. Correct me if I do."

She played with the deliberation and accuracy of Feller should he have to make a little ammunition for his automatic go a long way, and Mrs.

Galland did not observe a single error.

"Hurrah! I won!" Marta cried triumphantly, with some of her old vivacity.

Then she drew away from the table wearily. The strain of concentrating her mind had been worse than that of the battle; or, rather, it had merely added another strain to a tortured brain after a sleepless night.

For her ears had been constantly alert. The demon had moved one of his claws to fresh ground; the inferno on the La Tir side of the frontier had s.h.i.+fted to a valley beyond the Galland estate, where the firing appeared to come from the Brown side. Breaking from the leash of silence, guns, automatics, rifles--each one straining for a speed record--roared and crashed and rattled in greedy chorus, while the clock ticked perhaps a hundred times. Thus famished savages might boll their food in a time limit. Thereafter, for a while, the battle was desultory.

Then came another outburst from Dellarme's men, which she interpreted as the response to another rush by the Grays; and this yelping of the demon was not that of the hound after the hare, as in the valley, but of the hare with his back to the wall. When it was over there was no cheer.

What did this mean? Oh, that slow minute-hand, resting so calmly between hitches of destiny, now pointing to a quarter after eleven! For half a century, it seemed to her, Marta had endured watching its snail pace.

Now inaction was no longer bearable. Without warning to her mother she bolted out of the kitchen. Mrs. Galland sprang up to follow, but Minna barred the way.

"One is enough!" she said firmly, and Mrs. Galland dropped back into her chair.

In the front rooms Marta found havoc beyond her imagination. A portion of the ceiling had been blown out by a sh.e.l.l entering at an up-stairs window; the hardwood floors were littered with plaster and window-gla.s.s and ripped into splinters in places.

"How can we ever afford repairs!" she thought.

But she hurried on, impelled by she knew not what, through the dining-room, and, coming to the veranda, stopped short, with dilating eyes and a cry of grievous shock. Two of his men were carrying Dellarme back from the breastwork where they had caught him in their arms as he fell. They laid him gently on the sward with a knapsack under his head.

His face grew whiter with the flow of blood from the red hole in the right breast of his blouse. Then he opened his lips and whispered to the doctor: "How is it?" Something in his eyes, in the tone of that faint question, required the grace of a soldier's truth in answer.