"Have a nice rest?" Bill Fielding asked.
Terrence reached a weak hand to the back of his head and felt bandages. "Did I catch a spring bolt?" he asked.
Bill grinned, "Well, no. Not exactly. It was more on the order of Private O'Hara's rifle butt. He was trying to hit the Rumi you were necking with."
"I might have known," Terrence groaned.
"We lost six men but recovered all the bodies except for one. We've got four wounded ... litter cases. Thought you were going to make it five for a while."
"Well, they won't slow us down too much. We still have about a hundred and fifty miles to go. We'll camp here for the night and move out at dawn."
Marching in the early morning and resting in the heat of the day before another afternoon march, the Narakan Rifles covered another fifty miles of the distance to Fort Craven without incident but not without signs of Rumi. Twice they came on recently occupied camps and once they caught sight of a Rumi patrol moving parallel to their own line of march.
The next morning, which was blistering and cloudless, they were only seventy miles from the Fort.
"Maybe we ought to give the radio another try." Terrence decided. "We're close enough to have a chance of getting through now."
Polasky set up the field radio.