d spear had been buried in his chest. A second wave of
dervishes lapped over the hillocks, and burst upon the machine-gun and
the right front of the line. The sailors were overborne in an instant,
but the Mallows, with their fighting blood aflame, met the yell of the
Moslem with an even wilder, fiercer cry, and dropped two hundred of them
with a single point-blank volley. The howling, leaping crew swerved
away to the right, and dashed on into the gap which had already been
made for them.

But C Company had drawn no trigger to stop that fiery rush. The men
leaned moodily upon their Martinis. Some had even thrown them upon the
ground. Conolly was talking fiercely to those about him. Captain
Foley, thrusting his way through the press, rushed up to him with a
revolver in his hand.

"This is your doing, you villain!" he cried.

"If you raise your pistol, Captin, your brains will be over your coat,"
said a low voice at his side.

He saw that several rifles were turned on him. The two subs. had
pressed forward, and were by his side. "What is it, then?" he cried,
looking round from one fierce mutinous face to another. "Are you
Irishmen? Are you soldiers? What are you here for but to fight for
your country?"

"England is no country of ours," cried several.

"You are not fighting for England. You are fighting for Ireland, and
for the Empire of which it as part."

"A black curse on the Impire!" shouted Private McQuire, throwing down
his rifle. "'Twas the Impire that backed the man that druv me onto the
roadside. May me hand stiffen before I draw trigger for it.

"What's the Impire to us, Captain Foley, and what's the Widdy to us
ayther?" cried a voice.

"Let the constabulary foight for her."

"Ay, be God, they'd be better imployed than pullin' a poor man's thatch
about his ears."

"Or shootin' his brother, as they did mine."

"It was the Impire laid my groanin' mother by the wayside. Her son will
rot before he upholds it, and ye can put that in the charge-sheet in the
next coort-martial."

In vain the three officers begged, menaced, persuaded. The square was
still moving, ever moving, with the same bloody fight raging in its
entrails. Even while they had been speaking they had been shuffling
backwards, and the useless Gardner, with her slaughtered crew, was
already a good hundred yards from them. And the pace was accelerating.
The mass of men, tormented and writhing, was trying, by a common
ins