Stevens tipped his head violently back, and contemplated the stars. ‘Bloody hundreds of them,’ he complained.
Shepherd said, ‘You want to take the first sleep, Jim?’ I half nodded back, thinking: Not likely – not so that you and Stevens can see me off with a bullet, then reverse The Elephant to Samarrah.
Silence for a space, then Shepherd caught up his rifle and commenced walking towards the railway line. When he’d fallen in with it, he kept going – heading north across the desert, which had been turned grey by the moonlight, like a great carpet of dust.
‘Where’s he gone?’ I asked Stevens, who shrugged, saying, ‘A little five-mile scamper.’
‘Has a lot of pep, doesn’t he?’
‘He has the right idea,’ said Stevens. ‘You get mouldy from lack of exercise.’
‘But he’s been on the go since six – in this killing heat . . .’
Stevens contemplated me with more attention, and more intelligence, than usual.
‘First rule of boxing,’ he said. ‘Keep your chin down.’
My visit to number 11 Clean Street: he’d finally got round to mentioning it.
‘I daresay,’ I said. ‘Why bring it up now?’
‘. . . But I suppose if you’re going to put the gloves on to have a conversation,’ he continued, ‘then that goes by the board.’
‘I went up for a bit of a spar . . . Turned out I had a friend in common with the chap. Know him yourself, do you? The southpaw?’
Stevens – looking sidelong, perhaps scanning the horizon for Shepherd – made no answer at all.
‘He’s a machine-gunner,’ I said.
‘Well, I hope he’s better with the Emma Gee than he is with his fists,’ said Stevens, and that somehow blocked any further enquiry.
I made a show of getting ready for bed – by going over to the engine, pissing behind it, and having a sluice-down with the water from the slacker pipe. I picked up a bottle of water and carried it and my revolver over to the tent-without-sides. I lay down – and that was my mistake, for I was immediately asleep.
I awoke in a panic to see Shepherd moving about at the limit of my vision. Stevens’s boots were about three feet from my head. How could these two men be acting in concert when one was five hundred yards off? Then Shepherd was running pell-mell along the tracks, and Stevens was rapidly kicking over the fire. I came out from under the tent, and Shepherd had made the footplate of the engine. He held a small handgun – a gun made of gold; no of course not, it must be brass. He was slowly raising the thing, thinking hard about what he was doing, and it was for a moment pointed in my direction, but he continued raising it so that it ended high over his head, like the pistol of the man who starts a running race. He fired, and the whole desert jolted, so that I saw it for a second seemingly tilted and illuminated by a green light. Shepherd had fired a flare – it showed on the horizon three advancing parties of men with guns. As the light of the flare burnt out, their black robes became grey in the moonlight, but still they came on. Arab raiders.
Shepherd was roaring at me from the engine, and it seemed he’d been doing so for a while. Stevens was racing for the engine. I began to follow; Stevens made his leap, and was up and on the engine, but I was checked by a droning noise, and a puff of sand six inches from my boot – a perfect little dandelion rising and falling in a second. I lay down flat. I was about fifty yards from The Elephant. That drone had meant a Martini bullet, and there now came two fizzes – Mausers. Another drone came, then a deep booming – a fucking blunderbuss, by the sound of it. The Arab shootists were like a choir, each with his own voice, but any one of those guns could do for me. I tried to press myself into the sand, and another dandelion rose and fell two feet from my head. On the engine, Shepherd had the reverser right back. I could see Stevens behind him, shovelling coal in a half crouch. But then Stevens flung down the shovel, and took up his rifle. He leant out and fired towards the Arabs. I turned my head, imagining I could see the bullet as it flew . . . and one of the Arabs was down. I refixed my gaze on the engine, where Shepherd had now replaced Stevens – he was the one leaning out, I mean, and he was loosing off revolver bullets at the rag-tag Arab army. I now had one of them in my own sights; I fired, and . . . nothing. I stood and raced for the engine. A drone, then two fizzes as I leapt – and I was on to the footplate.
Stevens said, at the moment of my arrival, ‘I got one of the filthy devils,’ and Shepherd, still hanging out shooting, said, ‘Don’t crow, Stevens. He’s a man just like you are.’ He turned to me: ‘Regulator’s yours, Jim,’ he said.