“Where are the islanders now?”
“Scattered, and most of them in hiding, I fancy, unless General Pleshskev has succeeded in rallying them again.”
I frowned and beat my brains together. You can’t fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists. No matter how well led and armed they are, you can’t do anything with them. For that matter, how could anybody do much against a game of that toughness?
“Suppose you stick here and keep your eye on the boat,” I suggested. “I’ll scout around and see what’s doing further up, and if I can get a few good men together, I’ll try to jump the boat again, probably from the other side. But we can’t count on that. The getaway will be by boat. We can count on that, and try to block it. If you lie down you can watch the boat around the corner of the building without making much of a target of yourself. I wouldn’t do anything to attract attention until the break for the boat comes. Then you can do all the shooting you want.”
“Excellent!” he said. “You’ll probably find most of the islanders up behind the church. You can get to it by going straight up the hill until you come to an iron fence, and then follow that to the right.”
“Right.”
I moved off in the direction he had indicated.
At the main street I stopped to look around before venturing across. Everything was quiet there. The only man I could see was spread out face-down on the sidewalk near me.
On hands and knees I crawled to his side. He was dead. I didn’t stop to examine him further, but sprang up and streaked for the other side of the street.
Nothing tried to stop me. In a doorway, flat against a wall, I peeped out. The wind had stopped. The rain was no longer a driving deluge, but a steady down-pouring of small drops. Couffignal’s main street, to my senses, was a deserted street.
I wondered if the retreat to the boat had already started. On the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the bank, I heard the answer to that guess.
High up on the slope, almost up to the edge of the cliff, by the sound, a machine gun began to hurl out its stream of bullets.
Mixed with the racket of the machine gun were the sounds of smaller arms, and a grenade or two.
At the first crossing, I left the main street and began to run up the hill. Men were running toward me. Two of them passed, paying no attention to my shouted, “What’s up now?”
The third man stopped because I grabbed him—a fat man whose breath bubbled, and whose face was fish-belly white.
“They’ve moved the car with the machine gun on it up behind us,” he gasped when I had shouted my question into his ear again.
“What are you doing without a gun?” I asked.
“I—I dropped it.”
“Where’s General Pleshskev?”
“Back there somewhere. He’s trying to capture the car, but he’ll never do it. It’s suicide! Why don’t help come?”
Other men had passed us, running downhill, as we talked. I let the white-faced man go, and stopped four men who weren’t running so fast as the others.
“What’s happening now?” I questioned them.
“They’s going through the houses up the hill,” a sharp-featured man with a small mustache and a rifle said.
“Has anybody got word off the island yet?” I asked.
“Can’t,” another informed me. “They blew up the bridge first thing.”
“Can’t anybody swim?”
“Not in that wind. Young Catlan tried it and was lucky to get out again with a couple of broken ribs.”
“The wind’s gone down,” I pointed out.
The sharp-featured man gave his rifle to one of the others and took off his coat.
“I’ll try it,” he promised.
“Good! Wake up the whole country, and get word through to the San Francisco police boat and to the Mare Island Navy Yard. They’ll lend a hand if you tell ’em the bandits have machine guns. Tell ’em the bandits have an armed boat waiting to leave in. It’s Hendrixson’s.”
The volunteer swimmer left.
“A boat?” two of the men asked together.
“Yes. With a machine gun on it. If we’re going to do anything, it’ll have to be now, while we’re between them and their getaway. Get every man and every gun you can find down there. Tackle the boat from the roofs if you can. When the bandits’ car comes down there, pour it into it. You’ll do better from the buildings than from the street.”
The three men went on downhill. I went uphill, toward the crackling of firearms ahead. The machine gun was working irregularly. It would pour out its rat-tat-tat for a second or so, and then stop for a couple of seconds. The answering fire was thin, ragged.
I met more men, learned from them that the general, with less than a dozen men, was still fighting the car. I repeated the advice I had given the other men. My informants went down to join them. I went on up.
A hundred yards farther along, what was left of the general’s dozen broke out of the night, around and past me, flying downhill, with bullets hailing after them.
The road was no place for mortal man. I stumbled over two bodies, scratched myself in a dozen places getting over a hedge. On soft, wet sod I continued my uphill journey.
The machine gun on the hill stopped its clattering. The one in the boat was still at work.
The one ahead opened again, firing too high for anything near at hand to be its target. It was helping its fellow below, spraying the main street.
Before I could get closer it had stopped. I heard the car’s motor racing. The car moved toward me.
Rolling into the hedge, I lay there, straining my eyes through the spaces between the stems. I had six bullets in a gun that hadn’t yet been fired on this night that had seen tons of powder burned.
When
