The horrid noises seemed to be drawing closer, and I thought that they were growing louder away to the right, where those huts stood.
CHAPTER XVIII
To the Rescue
As I lay there on my trestle-bed, groaning at my miserable position, more bullets came in through the shutters and brought down showers of plaster from the wall behind me.
At last I could stand the strain no longer, and was on the point of trying to reach the shutters and open them, so that at least I could see what was happening, when Miss Borsen, white as a sheet, came in, and, seeing me with one leg over the side of the bed, bade me angrily to lie down and not move or speak.
I lay down, but had to speak to tell her to crouch on the floor, out of the way of the bullets, and the effort made more of that blood come into my mouth. Down I lay as flat as a pancake, and she huddled on the floor too, because, whilst she was bending over me to wipe the blood from my mouth, another bullet had smacked up against the wall and sprinkled her with plaster.
She crouched there, her face twitching as the Maxim overhead rattled, and the clamour and shrieking outside, coming from the direction of the slope and barbed-wire fence, seemed to grow nearer and louder.
At last the appalling uproar sounded as if it were right under the loopholed wall itself—almost under the windows of the house. Ellis's Maxim stopped—stopping, I realized, because the loopholed wall now screened the Afghans from its fire; but the Maxim aboard the "B.A." fired more vigorously than ever, and six-pounder shells were bursting rapidly, one after the other, quite close beneath us.
Miss Borsen had buried her face in her hands. Suddenly she raised herself, and, with open mouth and eyes, listened. The character of the yells had altered; they were screams now, they were going away from us. The attack was failing.
The Maxim on the roof opened again as the Afghans fell back from the cover of the loopholed wall. I heard Ellis and Hartley shouting joyously, and knew they had got them on the run.