Caribbean Area -- Fiction; Disguise -- Fiction; Entomologists -- Fiction; Heiresses -- Fiction; Love stories
Perkins, feeling with a cautious heel, found himself opposite the entry
indicated by the voice. Turning, he darted into the narrow embrasure.
Here he was comparatively safe from the missiles that were now coming
from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his
formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm’s length.
Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud,
hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial
shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were
of lead. She listened and shivered.
Instead of the sound that she dreaded there came the ringing of hoofs
on stones, followed by yells of alarm. She opened her eyes to see Von
Plaanden, bent forward in his saddle at the exact angle proper to the
charge, urging his great horse down upon the mass of people as
ruthlessly as if they had been so many insects. Through the circle he
broke, swinging his mount around beside the shallow doorway before
which three Caracuñans already lay sprawled, attesting the vigor of the
defender’s final resistance. Back of the horseman lay half a dozen
other figures. The Hochwaldian jerked out his sword and stood, a
splendid spectacle. Very possibly he was not wholly unmindful of his
own pictorial quality or of the lovely American witness thereto.
His intervention gave a few seconds’ respite, one of those checks that
save battles and make history. Now, in the further making of this
particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction;
such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives. It emanated from
Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope,
followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still
perspiring from their afternoon’s cricket. Against bare legs a cricket
bat is a highly dissuasive argument. The Britons swung low and hard for
the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men
are in the minority against other races. The downhill wing of the mob
being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance,
leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with
staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.
“Wot’s the merry game?” inquired the cockney cheerfully.
Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by
many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running
from a great gash in the scalp.
“He went down in front of my horse,” explained the Hochwald secretary
coolly.
At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different
from its former voice. Galpy’s teeth set and his cricket bat went up in
the air.
“There’ll be killing for this,” he said. “I know these blightehs. That
yell means blood. We must make a bolt for it. Is this all there is of
us?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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