“You bet!” I whispered to myself.
The enemy looked like two walking brush-heaps. Honest, it was kind of funny to see them crawling up-hill, and then, on the other hand, it wasn’t comical at all, for there was no stopping them. The minute they stepped into range we began firing, but our pebbles spatted against the shields and didn’t do a bit of harm. Once in a while we managed to clip Batten on the leg or Bill on the arm, but that was all.
On they came, slow as snails, but getting nearer and nearer. We peppered at them as fast as we could set stones in our slings, but we might as well have been shooting into the river with the idea of hitting a fish. They meant business, too; you could tell it by the way they kept coming without saying a word, grim-like. I began to shake in the knees, but Mark was as steady as a tree. I was willing to give up and scoot, but he never budged, just drew back his rubbers and whanged away as if he was shooting at a target. Cool! He was so cool the breeze across him got chilly.
Now the enemy was only sixty feet down, now fifty, now forty. Up, up they came, closer and closer. We could hear them panting, and the sound of their hands clutching and their feet crunching into the bank. Once in a while the loose earth would give away and one of them would slip back a few feet. The only good that did was, maybe, to give us a shot back at the shield. You can be good and sure we never let a chance slip.
Thirty feet! Twenty-five feet! Twenty feet! The nearer they came the louder my heart beat and the more my knees wabbled. I know how a soldier feels just before he turns and runs—and I know why he doesn’t turn and run: it’s because the soldier next to him doesn’t; it’s because he’s ashamed to have the other soldiers think he’s more afraid than they are. Mark showed no more signs of running than a saw horse, so I stayed on.
All the time I’d been saving up one last hope. When Batten and Bill were scrambling onto the shelf in front of the cave I turned and hauled myself up the slope to my big boulder where I’d left the lever.
“Git to one side, Mark!” I yelled.
He edged over ten feet to the right. Bill and Batten kept right on. The cave was under their noses, and the turbine was in the cave. That was all they thought of right then, I guess. They were going to get it back! They had lost it after all their trouble, and now they were going to get it again. Neither of them offered to bother Mark; they made straight for the cave and the engine.
“Look out below!” I shouted.
They looked up and stopped sudden, so sudden they almost toppled over backward.