It was his word--"scourge them." And that to the best of our ability was what we did. The shooting was not very good, or we should have been rid of the enemy much more quickly. "Stand clear, there!" commanded a voice from above our heads. Rhoda Polly had got a team of men together to lever up Allerdyce's machine gun. She was now bending over it, and those who remained of the dead man's crew bent themselves to the task of getting it in order. "To right and left, and fire as they run. Now then----!" commanded Rhoda Polly. "Re-r-r-r-rach-rach-rach!" The mitrailleuse spat hate and revenge over our heads. The young "second-in-command," trained by Allerdyce, stood calmly to his post and swept the muzzle wherever he saw a cluster of assailants. "Allerdyce! Allerdyce!" yelled the crew of No. 4. They did not mean him to hear. Allerdyce would never hear anything again--neither the voice of his native Doon, running free over the shallows, nor the raucous voice of his beloved gun, nor even the shouting of his men as they wrote their vengeance for a dead leader across the Cours of Aramon in letters of blood. This happened almost at the end of the battle, but what I remember best of it all, in all that unknown and unknowable turmoil of death, is the half-wild, half-quixotic, altogether heroic figure of Jack Jaikes, dancing and vapouring under the splendours of the moonlight. "Come back and fecht!" he yelled. "Come back and fecht for the sowl o' Allerdyce! On'y ten o' ye. I tell ye I'll slay ye for the sake o' Allerdyce! Ye made what's no human o' him. Come back and I will choke ye wi' my bare hands. We were chums, Allerdyce and me, at the Clydebank yaird. God curdle your blood for what ye did to Allerdyce. Come back and fecht, ye hounds o' hell, come back and fecht!" CHAPTER XXXIV THE PASSING OF KELLER BEY We were hard put to it before we got the madman in, and then it was worse than ever. For he, our master, the bravest man that I ever saw or think to see, sat down beside his friend and wept like a child. He did not even look at us when we took up Allerdyce and buried him in a long trench with the others who had fallen--five in all, a heavy loss for us who were so few. "I never want to see Greenock again!" wailed Jack Jaikes, "we were that pack, Allerdyce and me----" "Go and fetch your father, Rhoda Polly," said I, "this will never do. It would be no use to telegraph. He would never believe the like of Jack Jaikes." "May God grant he can come!" said Rhoda Polly, and darted off. I went into the outhouse where Keller Bey lay. Harold Wilson was bending over him, a steel probe in his hand. He stood up as I came in, looking narrowly at the point. "I think we shall pull him through, but so long as we have that young lady"--he pointed at Alida, who was exhausting herself in a long outburst of Oriental sorrow--"I fear we can do nothing radical." "Wait till Rhoda Polly comes back," I said, "she will get her friend away."