Fix Bay'nets: The Regiment in the Hills

by George Manville Fenn

Then his thoughts took another direction. Why should not—after the careful preparations made—the ruse be successful, the enemy be deceived, and go in pursuit according to their ideas, leaving the two adventurers free to make their fresh departure? But that, the most natural outcome of the plan, Bracy, in his excitement, set aside as being the least likely to occur, and he lay in agony, straining every nerve to condense his faculties into the one great sense of hearing, till it seemed to him that his companion’s breathing sounded preternaturally loud.

“Why, he’s asleep! The miserable, careless scoundrel!” thought Bracy. “Those men have no thought beyond the present. How can one trust them? How easily we might be surprised if he were the watch!”

A flush of shame made the thinker’s cheeks burn the next moment, he had, in his annoyance, stretched out his left hand to reach dodge’s shoulder and give him a violent shake. But half-way he checked the progress of his hand; for, sotting aside the danger of waking a sleeper and making him start and utter some ejaculation, which might betray them to a lurking enemy, he recalled the fact that a touch was to be the signal to announce the coming of the enemy.

The next moment, as his hand lay upon the snow where he had let it fall, another hand was laid upon it, and his fingers were gripped by a set of fingers which held it fast and gave it a firm, steady pressure, to which he warmly responded, his heart beating fast, and a genial glow of satisfaction running through him in his penitence for misjudging his faithful companion.

Then the hand that grasped his was snatched away, and he lay listening and gazing in every direction that he could command for the danger just signalled to him by Gedge. Nothing to right or left, and he dared not stir to look back over the snow. Nothing in front, not a sign of any one near; and in his excitement he began to wonder whether his companion had made a mistake in his over-eagerness, for the silence was more oppressive than ever.

“What was that?”

A spasm shot through the listener, making every nerve and muscle tense as steel; his breath came thick and fast, and the dull, heavy throb, throb of his heart sounded loudly in his brain—so loudly that he held his breath and would have checked the pulsations if he could.

There was no doubt now: the enemy was close at hand, and Bracy’s fingers closed over the hilt of his bayonet with a tremendous grip, for he felt that his revolver would be useless in that terrible darkness, and he shrank from wasting a shot.

He could see nothing, but there was the danger just in front in the snow of those thirty yards which lay between them and the rocks. That danger was represented to the listeners in imagination by the figure—two figures—of the white-coated enemy, crawling slowly as huge worms might, have progressed over the snow. At times they were perfectly still, but ever and again there was the extremely gentle, crackling sound of the icy grains rubbing together with a soft, rustling sound, no more than a snake would have made passing along a dusty track.

Bracy strained his eyes, but he could see nothing. He could not tell whether the two enemies were a yard or ten or twenty away from where he lay; but his straining ears told him that they were there, passing him from right to left, and he felt convinced that others must be moving slowly from all directions towards that one point, where the helmets were placed upon the pieces of stone.