The sound of triumphant
shouting drew nearer; he heard the wrenching and tearing of doors
crashing down before an impetuous onslaught, the cling of steel, a
howl of sudden satisfaction. His hand tightened upon his revolver; he
stood ready to meet his enemy single-handed, to fight out the duel
between man and man. But no one came. A bewildering silence had
followed upon the last bloodthirsty cry. It was as though the hand of
death had fallen and with one annihilating blow beaten down the
approaching horde in the high tide of their victory. But of the two
this strange stillness was the more terrible. It penetrated to the
little waiting group in the old bungalow and filled them with the
chill horror of the unknown. Something had happened--that they felt.
Lois crept to the doorway and peered out into the gathering daylight.
Here and there, half hidden behind the shelter of the trees, she could
see the khaki-clad figures of the Gurkhas, some kneeling, some
standing, their rifles raised to their dark faces, waiting like
statues for the enemy that never came. A dead, petrified world, the
only living thing the sunshine, which played in peaceful indifference
upon the scene of an old and a new tragedy! Lois thought of her
mother. By the power of an overwrought imagination she looked back
through a quarter of a century to a day of which this present was a
strange and horrible repetition. For a moment she lived her mother's
life, lived through the hours of torturing doubt and fear, and when a
stifled cry called her back to the reality and forced her to turn from
the sunlight to the dark room, it was as though the dead had risen, as
though her dreams had taken substance.
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