me.

Doloria must have understood this, and for the first time she began to
fire, yet at nearly a thousand yards, when one's target not only moves
but looks small and black upon a blackened background, and is made
further elusive by a haze of smoke, only luck can hit it. Still we
played that luck to the last card, until one by one the men made safe
and disappeared. Then she laid her rifle on the parapet, and I think
took a long breath. For a moment neither of us spoke, each being afraid
of saying too much, perhaps.

Beginning to fill the magazine, she finally announced:

"They're seven, Jack. You hit that first one, a while ago."

"No," I replied, "or we'd see him on the ground now. He merely ducked,
like the others."

"But there were eight the night I escaped!"

"Then Smilax got one during the chase--which shows that he and Echochee
haven't been killed." But during this our eyes never left the ditch and
our rifles were ready to blaze away at the first sign of movement.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because if he had to make a last stand there wouldn't be as many as
seven men here now." And I firmly believed it, knowing how savagely our
two servants would account for themselves. I think she agreed with me.

An ominous silence lay about us. I felt sure that the scoundrels were
crawling up along the ditch, and told her this. She nodded. Minutes
passed.

At one point, about two hundred yards out, there was a spot where the
saw-palmettoes and bay bushes thinned to almost nothing. Sooner or later
the enemy would have to cross this, and I watched it without blinking
because it would offer our best--if not, indeed, last--chance to hold
them. So when finally a stooping figure showed itself I opened a
vigorous fire. He drew back, or fell back, and the silence again
enveloped us, to be shattered an instant later by a fusillade of shots
that made the air thick with crackling whines. The location of our fort
was known.

"Down, down!" I yelled.

"I am," she answered, obeying as the best of soldiers. "I'll load for
you!"

We were being showered with lead by now, and between the wasplike things
speeding overhead and their "sput-sput" as they hit the logs, I dared
expose no more than my eyes and forehead while emptying rifle after
rifle. In the fleeting movement of handing one down and taking the other
I saw Doloria sitting near my feet, with several opened boxes of
cartridges on the ground beside her. We had plenty of ammuniti