Shrieks from the Reds, who could not but see me, and screams of delight from the enemy, greeted the sight of a single crazy man, running down to the jaws of this living Juggernaut from the wilds.
I reached my goal, I fell to my knees and fumbled the matches. The monstrous battalion was nearly half way up to the trench of bombs. My fuses failed to ignite. In desperation I broke off the ends and bore them down upon my living coal. My thumb was burned, but I felt nothing. A fierce hiss from the powder electrified my every fibre. I leaped to my feet and darted part way back to the wall.
“Man,” came the cry of a sweet small voice.
Turning, I saw that my little Tike had followed me down the slope to the fuses. There he sat beside them—and the serpents of igniting powder were racing down to the mines, and the thundering horde of foes was racing upward, toward the little chap and me. Insanely I ran with all my might to rescue my only loyal Link—the baby who sat in the sunlight.
How far away he was! What a time it seemed to take me to reach him! The elephants—how near and awful they looked! I could see their white-showing eyes. The monsters began to gallop upward, mad to wreak vengeance on something, for that goading behind their backs. The yells became a din. Already the brutes must be past my trench. It would fail—it would kill little Tike and myself—anything but the terrible creatures pounding the earth as they came upon us!
I snatched the little fellow up and ran desperately away. Would nothing ever happen? I fell—the ankle had gone at the critical moment. I rolled and saw the dread spectacle crowding up and up the sun-lit hill.
Then the earth was rent wide open—great castles of earth and elephants rose toppling in the air, along with a glare of red-and-yellow flames and a mighty volcano of smoke. The world belched forth a detonation like the crack of doom.
Another and yet another fearful fan of fire leaped exultantly upward, hurling Blacks and fragments of Blacks, and soil and rock that blew through the bellies of the elephants and shot away in every direction toward the tranquil sky.
I was deaf with the mighty roar and concussion. From the air the debris came raining down. The smoke seemed a fountain of enveloping fog. Shrieks—now of terror and dreadful pain—stabbed through the confusion. Then a rock whirred down so close to my head that it puffed me with its cushion of air. I heard a sound and looked for little Tike, whom I had permitted to slip to the ground as I fell.
He was there beside me, his steady, wistful eyes looking up in my face, his poor little legs fairly crushed into the earth, beneath that fragment of adamant, torn from its bed and hurled upon him.