“How much earth have you got there behind the disc?”
“Three feet—quite three feet.”
“All right”; and Dyke loosed off.
The noise was appalling. In that confined space each discharge made a crash and roar as of a thunder-storm; the walls seemed to be shaking as well as echoing; one felt that the building overhead must fall and one would be buried alive. They were repeating rifles—clumsy and poor machines if compared with the magazine rifle of to-day; but Dyke fired them so rapidly that he might have been working a mitrailleuse. Miss Verinder felt that the top of her head had gone, that the drums of her ears had split, that she was suffocating by the sulphurous fumes of the exploded powder; but all the while she was proudly watching, proudly admiring him.
He was a younger Anthony now, the shooter of big game, out in Africa; bringing his gun to his shoulder in one motion so swift that it was there before you saw it begin to come up; standing firmly planted on his legs, with his hat on the back of his head, his eye intent, blazing away under conditions where a miss means death.
“There. Thank you”; and handing back his smoking rifle, he began very carefully to examine each one that he had fired.
“Well,” said the stout assistant, with a complaisant grin, “I never see anything like it. You don’t fiddle about—you don’t shilly-shally, sir. No, my word, you don’t.”
Dyke gave him another slap on the back, laughed, and spoke in the frank exulting tone of a schoolboy who brags so simply that what he says does not sound vain-glorious. “I was taught to be nippy, old chap, by shooting at elephants on the charge. I never had any lessons at the rifle-butts—with a marker and a flag. But I was hurrying now because I have another appointment”; and he turned to one of the gentlemen in black coats. “Yes, they’re all right. Yes, I pass that lot. Two hundred and fifty, aren’t they? Come along.”
“That was a very noisy performance,” said Emmeline, when they were out in the street again.
“Was it?” he said carelessly. “I suppose it was. I say, I’m behind time. We must leg it, darling.”