car and stampeding elephant were unavailing, opened fire with the 50
men.
Spandau upon them. More accurately, he opened fire in the general
direction of the rolling dust cloud which obscured his forward
vision,
and through which he caught only occasional glimpses of beast and
machine. To confound further the aim of his gunner, the range was
rapidly increasing, the manoeuvres with which the armoured car was
trying to throw off the close pursuit of the elephant were violent and
erratic, and the cavalry tank itself was plunging and leaping wildly
over the rough ground.
Fire!' shouted the Captain. 'Keep firing,' and his gunner sent half a
dozen high-explosive shells screeching low over the plain. The other
tanks heard the banging of their Captain's cannon and immediately and
enthusiastically followed his example.
One of the first shells struck the thatched front wall of the blind in
which the Count and Gino cowered in horrified fascination.
The flimsy wall of grass did not trigger the fuse of the shell so there
was no explosion, but nevertheless the high-velocity shell passed not
eighteen inches from the Count's left ear, with a crack of disrupted
air that stunned him, before exiting through the rear wall of the blind
and howling onwards to burst a mile out in the empty desert.
'If the Count no longer needs me-' Gino snapped a hasty salute and
before the Count had recovered his wits enough to forbid it, he had
dived through the shell hole in the rear wall of the blind and hit the
ground on the far side, already running.
Gino was not alone. From each of the blinds along the line leapt the
figures of the other hunters, the sound of their hysterical cries
almost drowned by the roar of engines, the trumpeting of an angry bull
elephant and the continuous thudding roar of cannon fire.
The Count tried to rise from his chair, but his legs betrayed him and
he managed only a series of convulsive leaps. His mouth gaped wide in
his deathly pale face, but no sound came out of it. The Count was
beyond speech, almost beyond movement just the strength for one more
desperate heave, and the chair toppled forward, throwing the Count face
down upon the sunken earth floor of the blind, where he covered his
head with both arms.
At that instant, the armoured car, still under full throttle, came in
through the front wall. The thatched blind exploded around it, but the
impetus of the car's charge was sufficient to carry it in a single leap
over the dugout. The spinning wheels hurled inches over the
Count's prostrate form, showering him with a stinging barrage of sand
and loose gravel. Then it was gone.
The Count struggled to sit up, and had almost succeeded when the huge
enraged form of the bull elephant pounded over the blind. One of its
great feet struck the Count a glancing blow on the shoulder and he
screamed like a hand-saw and once again flung himself flat on the floor
of the dugout while the elephant pounded onwards towards the far
horizon, still in pursuit of the flying car.
The earth shook beneath the approach of another heavy body, and the
