Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan WarGrant, James
General
Playing with Fire: A Story of the Soudan War
Grant, James
Sudan -- Fiction
If the autumn sunset in Scotland is lovely, not less so is the autumn
sunrise, when seen from the slope of some green hill, like the spur
of the Ochils that looks down on Logic, while through pastoral valley
and wooded haugh the white silver mist is rolling. 'Then the tops of
the trees seem at first to rise above a country that is flooded,
while the kirk spire appears like some sea mark heaving out of the
mist. Then comes a great wedge-like beam of gold, cutting deep down
into the hollows, showing the stems of the trees and the roofs of the
cottages, gilding barn and outhouse, making a golden road through a
land of white mist that seems to rise on either side like the sea
which Moses divided to pass through dryshod. The dew-drops on the
sun-lighted summit the feet rest upon, are coloured like precious
stones of every dye, and every blade of grass is beaded with the
gorgeous gems.'
And never do the deer look more graceful and beautiful than when in
autumn they leave their lair among the bracken, when the blue
atmosphere is on a Scottish mountain side, and changing hues are on
leafy grove and heath-clad slope.
As the sportsmen, now pretty far apart, after beating successfully up
the slope of a stubble field on a hill-side, came upon some aged and
irregular hedgerows, full of gaps and interspersed with stunted
thorn-trees, and having on each side a wet grassy ditch, the warning
voice of the old keeper was heard some paces in the rear:
'Tak' tent, gentlemen; tak' tent. Nae cross shots here. There is a
different ground owre beyond.'
A covey of some twenty birds whirred up from a gap in the hedge, and
both Elliot and Hawkey Sharpe seemed to fire at it. We say seemed,
as the former fired straight to his front, the latter, who was on his
right, obliquely to the left; and then there came a sharp cry of
anguish and pain but seldom or never heard among a group of gay
sportsmen.
'By the Lord, but he's done it at last,' cried old Fowler.
'I aye thocht he wad be the death on the field o' somebody,' cried
Jamie Spens, the ex-poacher, who was acting as a beater.
'Sharpe's dune it at last,' cried Fowler again.
'What--who--what?' said a dozen voices.
'Murdered some ane--hang me if it isna Captain Elliot. Sharpe's a
devilish gleed gunner, if ever there was ane.'
Hawkey Sharpe heard these excited exclamations as if in a dream, and
as if heard by another and not himself.
He had unexpectedly seen Jack Elliot come, if not in his line of
fire, unseen by others, within range of it; and though hitherto
vaguely intent on mischief, a sudden, a devil-born impulse came like
a flash of lightning over him.
He fired, and Jack Elliot dropped like a stone!
The moment he had done so the heart of Hawkey Sharpe seemed to stand
still; enmity, rivalry, and affront were all forgotten--seemed never
to have existed. There was a roaring or surging of the blood in his
ears, while a sudden darkness seemed to fall upon the sunshiny
landscape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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