spokes of the wheel. It was fighting at close range now, close enough
to suit even Langham. He found himself in the front rank of it without
knowing exactly how he got there. Every man on both sides was playing
his own hand, and seemed to know exactly what to do. He felt neglected
and very much alone, and was somewhat anxious lest his valor might be
wasted through his not knowing how to put it to account. He saw the
enemy in changing groups of scowling men, who seemed to eye him for an
instant down the length of a gun-barrel and then disappear behind a
puff of smoke. He kept thinking that war made men take strange
liberties with their fellow-men, and it struck him as being most absurd
that strangers should stand up and try to kill one another, men who had
so little in common that they did not even know one another's names.
The soldiers who were fighting on his own side were equally unknown to
him, and he looked in vain for Clay. He saw MacWilliams for a moment
through the smoke, jabbing at a jammed cartridge with his pen-knife,
and hacking the lead away to make it slip. He was remonstrating with
the gun and swearing at it exactly as though it were human, and as
Langham ran toward him he threw it away and caught up another from the
ground. Kneeling beside the wounded man who had dropped it and picking
the cartridges from his belt, he assured him cheerfully that he was not
so badly hurt as he thought.

"You all right?" Langham asked.

"I'm all right. I'm trying to get a little laddie hiding behind that
blue silk sofa over there. He's taken an unnatural dislike to me, and
he's nearly got me three times. I'm knocking horse-hair out of his
rampart, though."

The men of Stuart's body-guard were fighting outside of the breastworks
and mattresses. They were using their swords as though they were
machetes, and the Irishmen were swinging their guns around their
shoulders like sledge-hammers, and beating their foes over the head and
breast. The guns at his own side sounded close at Langham's ear, and
deafened him, and those of the enemy exploded so near to his face that
he was kept continually winking and dodging, as though he were being
taken by a flashlight photograph. When he fired he aimed where the
mass was thickest, so that he might not see what his bullet did, but he
remembered afterward that he always reloaded with the most anxious
swiftness in order that he might not be killed before he had had
another