Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

they were scratches. He’d lost one shoe, and the foot was wrapped in canvas. It was a swell war.
    Jerry continued to wrap his foot, and nobody said anything. Dugan watched him, thinking of the wine. Then he looked across at the neat row of men lying side by side near the far parapet. As he looked, a bullet struck one of them, and the body jerked stiffly. It did not matter. They were all dead.
    “Over there in the cellar,” Jerry said. He nodded his head to indicate a squat gray stone building on the peak of a conical hill about a quarter of a mile off. “The colonel found a cellar the monks had. He brought his own wine with him and a lot of canned meat and cheese. He stored it in that cellar—just like in an icebox. I helped pack some of it in not over two weeks ago. He kept me on patrol duty three days extra just for breaking a bottle. He brought in a lot of grub, too.”
    The Biscayan glanced up, mumbling something in Spanish. He pulled a hair from his head and tested the edge of the blade, showing his teeth when the hair cut neatly.
    “What’s he say?”
    “He says it may still be there.” Jerry shifted his rifle and glanced speculatively at the low hill. “Shall we have a look?”
    “They’d blow our heads off before we could get there,” Slim protested, “night or no night.”
    “Look,” Jerry said, “we’re liable to get it, anyway. This is going to be like Anual, where they wiped them all out. Look how long we’ve been here and no relief. I think they’ve written us off.”
    “It’s been seventy-five days,” Dugan agreed.
    “Look what happened at Chentafa. The officer in command saw they’d had it and set fire to the post; then he died with his men.”
    “That’s more than these will do.”
    “Hell,” Jerry said, “I think they’re already dead. I haven’t seen an officer in a week. Only that corporal.”
    “They pick them off first. Those Moors can shoot.” Slim looked at Dugan. “How’d you get into this outfit, anyway?”
    “My ship was in Barcelona. I came ashore and was shanghaied. I mean an army patrol just gathered in a lot of us, and when I said I was an American citizen, they just paid no attention.”
    “Did you get any training?”
    “A week. That was it. They asked me if I’d ever fired a gun, and like a damned fool I told them I had. Hell, I grew up with a gun. I was twelve years old before I found out it wasn’t part of me. So here I am.”
    “They wanted men, and they didn’t care where or how they got them. Me, I’ve no excuse,” Slim said, “I joined the Spanish Foreign Legion on my own. I was broke, hungry, and in a different country. It looked like an easy way out.”
    Far off to the left there was an outburst of firing, then silence.
    “What happened to the colonel? The fat one who had all that wine brought in?”
    “Killed himself. Look, they tell me there’s a general for every twenty-five men in this army. This colonel had connections. They told him spend a month over there and we’ll promote you to general, so he came, and then we got pinned down, and he couldn’t get out. From Tetuan to Chaouen there’s a whole line of posts like this one here at Seriya. There’s no way to get supplies, no way to communicate.”
    The talk died away. It was very hot even though the sun was setting.
    A big Russian came up and joined them. He looked like a big schoolboy with his close-cropped yellow hair and his pink cheeks. “They come,” he said.
    There was a crackle of shots, and the four climbed to their feet. Dugan lurched from weariness, caught himself, and faced about. The Russian was already firing.
    A long line of Moors was coming down the opposite slope, their advance covered by a barrage of machine-gun fire from the trenches farther up the hill. Here and there a captured field gun boomed. Dugan broke open a box of cartridges and laid them out on a sandbag close at hand. Slowly and methodically, making each shot count, he began to fire.
    The Biscayan