He could not speak. The gesture of his arm said "Onward."
CHAPTER XXV
THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES
Two men in pale blue were lying in the irregular line that stretched
along the edge of the captured Roehampton stage from end to end, grasping
their carbines and peering into the shadows of the stage called Wimbledon
Park. Now and then they spoke to one another. They spoke the mutilated
English of their class and period. The fire of the Ostrogites had
dwindled and ceased, and few of the enemy had been seen for some time.
But the echoes of the fight that was going on now far below in the lower
galleries of that stage, came every now and then between the staccato of
shots from the popular side. One of these men was describing to the other
how he had seen a man down below there dodge behind a girder, and had
aimed at a guess and hit him cleanly as he dodged too far. "He's down
there still," said the marksman. "See that little patch. Yes. Between
those bars."
A few yards behind them lay a dead stranger, face upward to the sky, with
the blue canvas of his jacket smouldering in a circle about the neat
bullet hole on his chest. Close beside him a wounded man, with a leg
swathed about, sat with an expressionless face and watched the progress
of that burning. Behind them, athwart the carrier lay the captured
monoplane.
"I can't see him _now_," said the second man in a tone of provocation.
The marksman became foul-mouthed and high-voiced in his earnest
endeavour to make things plain.
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