"Watto!" he was beginning weakly, but she tore her gaze from his, and with a rending sob, covered her face with her hands, and ran blindly. He remained petrified and staring. And then a bullet struck him full in the face, and he screamed like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his arms and fell back, smothering in his own blood, behind the breastwork. And she never knew the cruel trick that Fate had played her, as she ran....
She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party were marched prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer went up from British throats, and bells were ringing joyfully, and "God Save the Queen!" bellowed in every imaginable key, was heard from every possible quarter.
It was while the Barala were wailing over their suffocated women and piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning yet hung heavy in the powder-tainted air, and the R.A.M.C. men and their volunteer helpers were bringing in the wounded and the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon a stretcher that was being carried through the rejoicing crowd, and screamed at the sight, and fell tooth and nail upon the human barrier that interposed between herself and it, and got through—how, she never could 'a' told you.
Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes protruding through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth grinned, revealed by the livid, drawn-back lips, and how she knew him again in such a orful styte she couldn't tell you—not if you offered her pounds and pounds to say——
She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted with the stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the look of a young woman who had risen above herself into the keen and piercing atmosphere of High Tragedy.
"Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin throat swelled visibly before the scream came: "'Cos 'e belongs to me! 'Ain't that enough? Then—I belongs to 'im! Dead or livin'—oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!"
The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare. Had been, one was tempted to say, in regard to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to a sympathetic bystander, "the chap has had a tremendous wipe over the head with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face besides. There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his near nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a kind o' miracle happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving of time to carry him straight to the Cemetery."
"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly, dropping on her knees beside it:
"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil——"
It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love.