"Stick your head lower down. That thing that said 'whisp-whisp!' was a rifle-bullet. They've got a blooming marksman down there, and I can't have you picked off. And don't talk rubbish. You know you're jolly going to marry me as soon as ever we can afford it, if ever we get out of this, which isn't likely." He clapped an arm snugly round her, and w-o-s-h came a load of pot-leg into the other side of the bedding which protected them. "Got any silly objections to make to that?"
"Have you thought over what it means, George? You know I'm not white."
"Bosh! Anyway you're white enough for me. Let go the chattie. And as I said before, Here's luck. Ugh! African river water, half mud, half essence of nigger from higher up. Moreover, as you remarked, hot as tea. Bang! there goes that infernal cannon again, and I've been gossiping with you—proposing, I mean—and haven't seen the flash. Plunked a shot into one of the palm oil puncheons in the store below, by the sound of it. Hullo, here comes the wind. Now, somebody will have his hair combed."
As though the discharge of the ancient brass gun had been a signal, a tornado opened upon them without warning, and almost in its full strength in the first blast.
One minute there was a stagnant calm, with air so hot and stale that it hardly seemed to refresh one to breathe it. The next wind travelling often at a hundred miles an hour bellowed and roared at them in tearing spasms of fury. The factory building reeled and groaned at its impact. Sticks, boards, corrugated roofing and empty barrels solved the problem of aerial flight. The close-grown trees of the forest that hemmed the factory in on the landward side were flattened earthwards as though by the pressure of some unseen giant hand; yes, flattened down, and down, till one thought that any human beings that were beneath them must inevitably be crushed out of all living shape into the foul, soft swampy ground beneath. And in cold truth some of the Okky men who cowered there during the enforced lull of the attack did so die.
The firing had ceased automatically on both sides, and a bombardment of sticks, leaves, sand and stones pelted them all unmercifully. It was impossible to face the wind; indeed, so violent was the torrent of air, that the mere act of taking breath became a matter of the nicest art.
The girl lay crouched under the huddle of bedding, buffetted into semi-unconsciousness, with Carter's arm holding her tight down to the floor boards of the veranda. He put his lips to her ear and bawled a message. She shook her head. Through the insane yell of the wind she could not hear a word. He laughed and kissed her, and then, taking away his protecting arm, worked his perilous way like some clinging, creeping thing into the inside of the dwelling.
Even this was filled with the wind. A door, smashed from its hinges, clattered noisily about in one corner, as though it had been some uncouth mechanical toy propelled by clumsy clockwork. Everything movable hopped on the floor, or danced from the walls. And of course to this disorder was added all the dishevelment which had been caused by the volleys of jagged cast iron fired through the flimsy walls by the Okky men's flintlocks. But Carter knew what he wanted, and sought for it with a single mind.
Presently from amongst the débris he emerged with a four-gallon drum; and then he worked his way to a cupboard where Slade kept his store of cigarettes. Luckily it was full. Slade had boarded a steamer lately where his credit in the forecastle shop was still untarnished, and his plausible tongue had procured him a whole two-dozen case of half-hundred tins on some ingenious deferred-payment scheme of his own. There were twenty-two of the green tins left, and Carter got them all out, opened them, and recklessly emptied their contents onto the floor. With infinite pains, and sheltering the liquid from the blast under his coat, he decanted the contents of the big drum into the tins till all were full. Then he re-lidded them, and jabbed a hole with his penknife in each lid.
He rebuilt them into their own wooden case as he primed them, and when this was full, dragged it out through the doorway into the casemate of mattresses. Laura and White-Man's-Trouble still crouched there helplessly, and the tornado still yelled and roared and boomed. It was carrying water with it now, bitter salt from the sea, and whipping the face like hail where it impinged.