'Kanaki and his boys didn't hear them,' Ruffy pointed out.
'Kanaki and his boys weren't listening for it,' said Bruce.
They were silent then for a while. One of the gendarmes started to snore
softly and Ruffy shot out a huge booted foot that landed in
the small of his back. The man cried out and scrambled to his knees,
looking wildly about him.
'You have nice dreams?' Ruffy asked pleasantly.
'I wasn't sleeping,' the man protested. 'I was thinking.'
'Well, don't think so loudly,' Ruffy advised him. 'Sounds though you
sawing through the bridge with a cross cut.' Another half hour dragged
itself by like a cripple.
'Fires are burning well,' commented Ruffy, and Bruce turned his head and
glanced through the loophole in the corrugated iron behind him at the
little garden of orange flame-flowers in the darkness.
'Yes, they should last till morning.' Silence again, with only the
singing of the mosquitoes and the rustle of the river as it flowed by
the piles of the bridge. Shermaine has my pistol, Bruce remembered with
a small trip in his pulse, I should have taken it back from her.
He unclipped the bayonet from the muzzle of his rifle, tested the edge
of the blade with his thumb, and slid it into the scabbard on his
web-belt. Could easily lose the rifle if we start mixing it in the dark,
he decided.
'Christ, I'm hungry,' grunted Ruffy beside him.
'You're too fat,' said Bruce. 'The diet will do you good.' And they
waited.
Bruce stared down into the hole in the floorboards. His eyes began
weaving fantasies out of the darkness, he could see vague shapes that
moved, like things seen below the sud ce of the sea. His stomach
tightened and he fought the impulse to shine his flashlight into the
hole. He closed his eyes to rest them. I will count slowly to ten, he
decided, and then look again.
Ruffy's hand closed on his upper arm; the pressure of his fingers
transmitted alarm like a current of electricity. Bruce's eyelids flew
open.
Listen,' breathed Ruffy.
Bruce heard it. The stealthy drip of water on water below them.
Then something bumped the bridge, but so softly that he felt rather than
heard the jar.
'Yes,' Bruce whispered back. He reached out and tapped the shoulder of
the gendarme beside him and the man's body stiffened at his
touch.
With his breath scratching his dry throat, Bruce waited until he was
sure the warning had been passed to all his men. Then he shifted the
weight of his rifle from across his knees and aimed down into the hole.
He drew in a deep breath and switched on the flashlight.
The beam shot down and he looked along it over his rifle barrel.
The square aperture in the floorboards formed a frame for the picture
that flashed into his eyes. Black bodies, naked, glossy with wetness,
weird patterns of tattoo marks, a face staring up at him, broad sloped
