Cunningham flung himself down on the ground. His revolver came out instinctively, but he shouted, “We’re friends, you idiots! Friends!”
There was no answer, but the knives stopped their silent rush through the air. It seemed as if the hidden men in the forest were debating in whispers, and the stillness was deadly. Cunningham lay still, gradually worming his revolver around to a convenient position for firing. He was tingling all over, but he found himself thinking with a supreme irrelevance that he thought he had seen the girl whose picture crackled in his breast pocket as he moved. He was quite sure of it.
He stood up suddenly and began to dust himself off. It was taking a chance, but it was wise. A young man stepped out from among the trees near by.
“You are our friends?” the young man demanded skeptically. “We have no friends.”
His speech had but the faintest of slurs in it, a teasing soft unfamiliarity which pricked one’s curiosity but could never be identified in any one syllable, much less put down in print.
Cunningham felt an abrupt relief, and quite as abruptly wanted to swear. He knew that this was the end of the route to romance and that the girl, Maria, was peering out from the tangled underbrush. And he had dived head foremost into a patch of loam and looked most unromantic. Therefore he said wrathfully, “If we weren’t your friends, don’t you think we’d have plugged into you with our gats? We saw you. You know that!”
The young man stared at him and Cunningham tried to rub the dirt off his nose and look dignified at the same time, thinking of the girl behind the trees.
Then the young man said skeptically, “What is a gat?”
“A revolver. A pistol. A handgun,” snapped Cunningham. “We’d have wiped out the lot of you.”
The man searched his face unbelievingly. A murmur came from somewhere behind him.