sympathy with the rifle barrel. His recent affliction, forgotten in
the excitement of the chase, returned suddenly with a force that turned
his bowels to water and his legs to rubber.
"Merciful Mary!" he whispered.
The entire horizon was moving, an Unbroken line from one edge of his
vision to the other. It took him many seconds to assimilate what he
was seeing, to realize that instead of fifteen horsemen, there were
suddenly thousands upon thousands, and that rather than running before
him they were now moving towards him at a velocity which he would not
have believed possible. As he stared, he saw rank upon rank of the
enemy seemingly rising from the very earth ahead of him, and rushing
towards him through a curtain of fine pale dust. He saw the lowering
sun glint red as blood upon the naked blades, and the drumming of
galloping hooves sounded like the thunder of a giant waterfall. Yet
faintly through the thunder, he heard the blood-freezing war shrieks of
the horsemen.
"Giuseppe," he gasped. "Take us away from here fast!
Very fast." This was the sort of appeal that went directly to the
driver's heart. He spun the big car so nimbly that the Count's
considerably weakened legs collapsed and he fell backwards onto the
leather seat.
Spread over a front of a quarter of a mile behind and on each side of
the Rolls came thirty of the dun coloured Fiat troop-carriers.
Despite their most fervent efforts, they had lost ground steadily to
the thrusting Rolls and they now lumbered along almost a thousand yards
behind. However, the excitement of the chase had affected the
occupants and they had climbed up on the cabs and cupolas, and hung
there hooting and yelling as they watched the sport, like runners at a
fox hunt.
This solid phalanx of vehicles, advancing almost wheel to wheel over
the rough ground, at a speed which would have horrified the
manufacturers, was suddenly faced with the urgent necessity of
reversing its headlong career without any loss of speed.
The drivers of the two leading trucks whose need was most critical
solved the problem by spinning_ the wheels to hard lock, one left and
the other right, and they came together radiator to radiator at a
combined speed in excess of sixty miles per hour. In a roaring cloud
of steam, splintering glass and rending metal, their cargoes of black
shirted infantry men were scattered like wheat upon the earth, or
impaled on various metal projections of the vehicle bodies. The
trucks, inextricably locked into each other, settled slowly on their
shattered suspensions, and no sooner had the dust begun to drift away
than there was a belly baking thump as the contents of their shattered
fuel tanks ignited in a tall volcanic spout of flame and black smoke.
The other vehicles managed to reverse their courses without serious
collision and streamed away into their own dust-clouds, pursued by a
horde of galloping, gibbering cavalry.
Count Aldo Belli could not bring himself to glance back over his
shoulder, certain that he would find a razor-edged sword swishing
inches from his cringing rear, and he leaned over his driver, spurring
him to greater speed by beating on his unprotected head and shoulders
with a fist clenched like a hammer.
"Faster!" shouted the Count, his fine baritone rising to an uncertain
contralto. "Faster, you idiot or I will have you shod" and he hit the
driver again behind one ear, experiencing a small spark of relief as
the Rolls overtook the rear vehicles in the disordered herd of fleeing
trucks.
Now at last he judged it safe to look back, and his relief was more
intense when he realized that the Rolls was easily capable of out
-running a mounted man. He experienced a warm flood of returning
courage.
"My rifle, Gino," he shouted. "Give me my rifle." But the
Sergeant was trying to focus his camera on the pursuing horde, and
the
Count hit him a blow over the top of his head.
"Idiot. This is war," he bellowed. "And I am a warrior give me my
rifle!" Giuseppe, the driver, hearing him, reluctantly decided that he
was expected to slow the Rolls to give the Count an opportunity to
follow his warlike intentions but, at the first diminution of speed,
he received another lusty crack on the centre of his pate and the
Count's voice went shrill again.
"Idiot," he screeched. "Do you want to get us killed?
Faster, man, faster!" and with unbounded relief the driver pushed his
foot flat on the throttle and the Rolls leapt forward again.
Gino was down on his hands and knees at the Count's feet, and now he
came up with the Mannlicher in his hands and handed it to the Count.
"It's loaded, my Count."
"Brave boy!" The Count braced himself with the rifle held at his hip,
and looked about for something to shoot at.
The Ethiopian cavalry had fallen well behind at this stage, and the
Rolls had overtaken most of the troop-carriers they were between the
Count and the enemy. The Count was considering ordering Giuseppe to
work his way out on to the flank, and thus give him an open field of
fire weighing the pleasure of shooting down the black riders at a
respectable range against any possible physical danger to himself and
he turned on his precarious perch in the back seat to look out in that
direction.
He stared incredulously at what he saw. Two great humpbacked shapes
were sailing in across the open grassland. They looked like two
deformed camels, coming on swiftly with a curious loping progress that
was at once comical and yet dreadfully menacing.
The Count stared at them uncomprehendingly, until with a sudden jolt of
shock and a new warm flood of adrenalin into his bloodstream,
he realized that the two strange vehicles were moving fast enough and
at such an angle as to cut off his retreat.
"Giuseppe!" he shrieked, and hit the driver with the butt of the
Marmlicher. It was not a heavy blow, it was meant merely to attract
his attention, but Giuseppe had already taken much punishment and was
by now lightly concussed.
He clung to the wheel with white knuckles and roared on directly into
the path of the new enemy.
"Giuseppe!" shrieked the Count again, as he suddenly recognized the
gaily coloured flashes on the turret of the nearest machine, and at the
same instant saw the thick stubby cylindrical shape that protruded
ahead of it. It was fluted vertically and at the far end a short pipe
like muzzle thrust out of the heavy water-jacket.
"Oh, merciful Mother of God!" he howled as the machine altered course
slightly and the muzzle of the Vickers machine gun pointed directly at
him.
"You fool!" he shrieked at Giuseppe, hitting him again.
"Turn! You idiot, turn!" Suddenly through the tears of pain, the
singing in his ears, and the blinding terror that gripped him, Giuseppe
saw the huge camel-like shape looming up ahead of him and he spun the
wheel again just as the muzzle of the Vickers erupted
in a fluttering
pillar of bright flame and the air all around them was torn by the hiss
and crack of a thousand bull whips.
Castelani stood on the cab of his truck, and peered disapprovingly
through his binoculars into the distant clouds of rolling dust where
confused movement and shadowy indistinguishable shapes flitted without
seeming purpose or pattern.
It had required all of his presence and authority to restrain the ten
trucks which carried the artillery men and towed their field pieces, to
keep them under his personal command and to prevent them joining in the
wildly enthusiastic rush after the small contingent of
Ethiopian horsemen.
Castelani was about to give the order to mount up and cautiously follow
the Count's charge into history and glory, when he raised the
binoculars again and it seemed that the pattern of dust-obscured
movement out there had altered. Suddenly he saw the unmistakable shape
of a Fiat transport emerge from the dust bank, and move ponderously
back towards him. Through the glasses the men who clung to the canvas
roof were all staring back in the direction from which they were coming
at speed.
He panned the glasses slowly and saw another truck lumber out of the
dust-mist headed back towards him. One of the soldiers on its roof was
aiming and firing his rifle back into the obscuring clouds and his
comrades, clinging to the roof about him, were frozen in attitudes of
trepidation and alarm.
At that moment, Castelani heard something which he recognized
instantly, his skin prickling at the distant ripping tearing sound.
The sound of a British Vickers machine gun.
His eye sought the direction, turning swiftly to the right flank of the
extended Italian column which seemed now to be rushing back towards him
in confused and completely disordered retreat.
He picked up the tall hump-backed shape instantly, standing high on the
open plain, coming in fast with the strange bounding motion of a
rocking horse, cutting boldly into the flank of the mass of
soft-skinned Italian transports.
"Unlimber the guns," shouted Castelani. "Prepare to receive enemy
armour." The Vickers machine guns in the turrets of the two armoured
cars had ball-type mountings. The barrels could be elevated or
depressed, but they could not traverse more than ten degrees to left or
right, this being the limit of the ball mountings" turn. The driver
had of necessity to act as gun-layer, swinging the entire vehicle to
Within the limited traverse aim of the gun, or at least bring it of the
mounting.
The Ras found this frustrating beyond all enduring. He would select a
target, and shout in perfectly clear and coherent Amharic to his
driver. Gareth Swales, not understanding a word of it, had already
selected another target and was doing his best to line up on it while
the Ras delivered a series of wild kicks at his kidneys to register his
royal right of refusing to engage it.
The consequence of this was that the Hump wove a crazy,
unpredictable course through the Italian column, spinning off at sudden
tangents as the two crew members shouted bitter recriminations at each
other, almost ignoring the sheets of rifle fire that thundered upon the
steel hull from point-blank range, like hail on a galvanized roof.
Priscilla the Pig, on the other hand, was doing deadly execution.
She had missed her first burst fired at the speeding Rolls, and it had
ducked away behind the screen of dust and bucking trucks. Now,
however, Jake and Gregoritis were working with all the precision and
mutual understanding that had developed between them.
"Left driver, left, left," called Gregorius, peering down the open
sights of the Vickers at the truck that roared and bounced along a
hundred yards ahead of them.
"All right, I'm on him," shouted Jake, as the vehicle appeared in the
narrow field of his visor. This was a perforated steel plate that
allowed only forward vision but once Jake had the truck centred, he
followed its violent efforts to dislodge him, closing in rapidly until
he was twenty yards behind it.
The back of the truck was packed with black-shirted infantry men. Some
of them were directing wild but rapid rifle fire at the pursuing car,
the bullets clanging and whining off the hull, but most of them clung
white-faced to the sides of the truck and stared back with stricken
eyes as the armoured death carrier bore down inexorably upon them.
"Shoot, Greg!" called Jake. Even through the cold anger that gripped
him, he was pleased that the boy had obeyed his orders and held his
fire until this moment. There would be no wastage now, at so short a
range every round ripped into the Italian truck, tearing through
canvas, flesh, bone and steel at the rate of seven hundred rounds a
minute.
The truck swerved violently and its front end collapsed; it went over
broadside, crashing over and over, flinging the men high in the air,
the way a spaniel throws off the droplets from its back as it leaps
from water to land.
"Driver, right," called Gregorius immediately. "Another truck,
right, a little more right that's it, you're on." And they roared in
pursuit of another panic-stricken load of Italians.
A hundred yards away on their flank the Hump scored its first success.
flying feet, and his frenzied and completely unintelligible commands.
He left the controls of the racing car to swing an angry punch at the
Ras.
"Cut that out, old chap," he snapped. "Play the game I'm on your side,
damn it." The car, no longer under control, jinked suddenly.
Almost side by side with them sped a Fiat truck, filled with
Italians, and the driver had not yet realized that there was another
enemy apart from the pursuing hordes of Ethiopian horsemen. His head
was twisted around over his shoulder at an impossible angle, and he
drove by instinct alone.
The two uncontrolled vehicles came together at an acute angle and at
the top of their combined speeds. Steel met steel in a storm of sparks
and they staggered away from the blow, both of them veering over
steeply. For a moment it" seemed that the Hump would go over; she
teetered at the extreme end of her centre of gravity and then came back
on to all four wheels with a crash that threw the men inside her
unmercifully against her steel sides, before racing on again with
Gareth wrestling at the wheel for control.
The Fiat truck was lighter and stood higher; the armoured car had
caught her neatly under the cab and she did not even waver, but flipped
over on her back, All four wheels still spinning as they "pointed at
the sky, and the cab and canvas-covered hood were torn away instantly,
the men beneath them smeared between steel and hard earth.
It was all too much for the Ras. He could no longer contain his
frustration at being enclosed in a hot metal box from which he could
see almost nothing, while all around
hundreds of his hated enemies were
escaping with complete impunity. He flung open the hatch of the turret
and stuck out his head and shoulders, yipping shrilly with bloodlust,
frustration, anger and excitement.
At that moment, an open sky-blue and glistening black Rolls-Royce
tourer flashed across the front of the Hump. In the rear seat was an
Italian officer bedecked with the glittering insignia of rank instantly
Gareth Swales and the Ras were in perfect accord once again.
They had found a target eminently acceptable to both of them.
"I say, tally-ho!" cried Gareth, to be answered by a bloodcurdling
"How do you do!" like the crowing of an enraged rooster from the
turret above him.
Count Aldo Belli was in hysterics, for the driver seemed to have lost
all sense of direction; now more than just a little concussed, he had
turned at right angles across the line of flight of the Italian column.
This was as hazardous as running an ocean liner at full speed through a
field of icebergs for the rolling dust-clouds had reduced visibility to
less than fifty feet, and out of this brown fog the lumbering
troop-carriers appeared without warning, the drivers in no fit
condition to take evasive action, all looking back over their
shoulders.
Ahead of them, two more monstrous shapes appeared out of the dust;
one was an Italian truck and the other was one of the cumbersome
camel-backed vehicles with the Ethiopian colours splashed upon its hull
and a Vickers machine gun protruding from its turret.
Suddenly the armoured car swerved and crashed heavily into the side of
the truck, capsizing it instantly and then swerving back towards the
Rolls. It came so close, towering over them so threateningly, that it
entered even Giuseppe's limited field of vision.
The effect was miraculous. Giuseppe shot bolt upright in his seat and,
with the touch of an inspired Nuvolari, brought the Rolls round on two
wheels, cutting finely across the armoured bows just at the moment that
the hatch of the turret flew open and a wizened brown face, filled with
the largest, whitest and most flashing teeth the Count had ever seen,
popped out of the turret and emitted a war cry so shrill and
heart-chilling that the Count's bowels flopped over like a stranded
fish.
As the barrel of the Vickers swung on to the Rolls, the Ethiopian