Adventure, December 1914 — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

76 where low bushes crowned it. He rode over it and disappeared. Nobody heard the yell for help as he was dragged from his horse and knifed; nobody saw his body again, for the jackals finished it that night. The rest of the battery continued to ad- vance, sublimely ignorant of twitching fin- gers curled over triggers, and of a machine- gun whose mechanism purred to the testing of a canny, careful Scot. The Cossacks loosed their tunics—lit their pipes—and some of them began to sing. It was that other sense all savage people have—that soldiers can acquire by dint of training—and that mobs sometimes betray —that wordless intuition of impending dan- ger that brought the advance guard to a halt at last within a hundred yards of the ridge. They halted first, and then an officer called “Halt!” without exactly knowing why. The order had but left his lips when a rifle-shot made the word his last one; and then instantly the whole long ridge became a line of spurting flame, and there was no advance-guard any longer—only a row of horses that stood patiently, and one loose horse that galloped back. Heads appeared above the ridge, and yells that made blood run cold were raised in a sudden storm of sound. It was the yells, and not rifle- firing that sent the trained horses galloping back at last, to throw the gun-teams in con- fusion and delay the business of “action front.” Training, good leading, courage, and the pride that rode with them because they trespassed on a foreign soil, all helped the | Cossacks—those and bad shooting; for the Persians were excited and their aim was vil- lainous. The Russians unlimbered and got into action with a speed that did them credit, and there were enough men left to man each gun and send a withering dose or two of grape shrieking on its way across the ridge. 3 But Andry’s machine gun opened on them — pip — p-p-p-p-ip-ip-ip-p-pip — pip- pip! He was taking his time and picking off the gunners. When two guns faced ’round to attend to him there were only just enough men left to obey the instantly succeeding order to limber up and go. In a storm of bullets that seemed to slit the very universe in fragments, and that rattled off the bar- rels of the guns like hail on a window, the Cossacks hooked their teams up, turned, Adventure and fled—back in the direction of the moun- tains—back to meet the infantry who should be hurrying hot foot to catch up with them. They rode straight toward Dick Anthony. He loosed but half his seven hundred, and rode straight at them! There would not have been room to turn had he used his whole force of mounted men; and he would have foregone the charge—would have shown himself, and waited for the Russians to surrender—but for his fear that the Cos- sacks might perhaps have time to break their breech mechanism. He wanted those guns entire, for a venture that no Cossack would have dared to dream of. Wa the guns were taken, and Andry Macdougal’s fear for Dick came near to being justified. A major of Cossacks, maddened at losing the battery that repre- sented all the pride he had, singled out Dick and met him halfway, blade to blade. He knew the stories about Dick that had gone abroad in constantly exaggerating circles; he knew it had been said that Dick was an impostor and not the real Richard Anthony of Arran; he remembered it all now as he rode, and in perfectly good French he hurled it at Dick’s head. “Impostor” was the mildest word he used; but he grew silent when the chargers’ heads were but six yards apart and he could see Dick’s eyes—blazing, amazing eyes— that looked straight through him, over the hilt of a sword that did not move. Some- thing of a duellist was Major Guchkov; he had met a man at dawn five times, and had survived untouched; he knew the sword THERE was sword-work before . well enough to prefer it to the chance of pistols, and full well enough to know a better swordsman when he met one. Now— as he watched that still, keen claymore point, that seemed to be unaffected by the charger’s galloping—he recognized a better sword than his. When the points met and the sparks burst out along two glancing blades, he felt a better sword than his, anda wrist that gave him qualms of anticipation up and down the backbone. The odds were on Dick Anthony from the instant they touched points. But a Cossack raced to his Major’s aid, and Dick’s good charger groaned, ham- strung and helpless. A Persian shot the Cossack dead as Dick dismounted, but the Gomiicovook C@