Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

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26 PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY Dick had come back, smiling at his appearance in the rough overalls and flannel shirt which he had slung on over his own clothes. Before he had time for more than a word with Frances, whom he found alone, she sent him after the gang about the furnace. As he hurried down, he passed the stumbling Smith, who lurched into him heavily and crushed him against a steel column. He tried to push the big man off. "Make a move toward that gun, you tin soldier !" The muscular arms of the foreman closed about him. "Into the furnace you go for it !" The slight, lithe lieutenant, without wasting breath on a word, wrestled vainly for a moment against the other's great strength. Suddenly he succeeded in tripping Smith and sprawled him, bellowing, on the floor. "Now ! The gun out, quick, and into the bath!" Dick had sprung free and joined the gang. But a shriek — a girl's sudden, frightened cry — shrilled into his ears above the roar of the furnaces and the rattle of the cranes. "Help ! Ethering — oh, Mr. Sommers ! Mr. Sommers !" The cry caused Dick to turn about, and brought him back with a rush. When the drunken foreman attacked Dick, Frances had been near them. She had stood near Smith after Dick had tripped him and gone on ; and now the foreman had picked himself up from the floor, had clutched her, and was crushing her to him. The workmen seemed neither to have seen nor to have heard. Pinckney and Marsh were making for her, but Dick reached her before them, and they were in time only to take Frances away as Sommers freed her by beating blows with all his force into the foreman's face. Smith, stunned and staggered, turned upon his assailant like a blinded bull. Gripping Dick's slender frame, heedless now of the blows bruising him, he picked the young officer up and began bearing him grimly toward the open door of the furnace, from which the gun had already been drawn. None of the men about the furnace, save one — O'Leary — seemed to see or to realize. He sprang from his work and rushed toward the two, reaching them but a few feet short of the furnace's mouth just as Dick broke the hold of the muscular arms. Smith stopped like a flash and picked up a heavy hammer from the floor. Just as he swung it, Dick had to close again, and O'Leary, coming to his aid, staggered back, stunned and bleeding from a glancing blow of the hammer. The great Sommers gun, white hot and iridescent even in the furious flare from the furnaces, hung from the crane almost directly over Dick's head. But, as Smith struck at him again and again, he had not a second in which to glance upward. Pinckney and others had now rushed down to separate them, but they spun and fought on the floor. Dick, fighting one fist free, struck the square jaw of the foreman again and again, and, at last, as two workmen caught Smith's feet, he jumped up, free. He looked first to Frances, to see that she was standing at a distance with Marsh, safe and uninjured; then he glanced up at his gun. But Pinckney, not daring to wait longer, had sounded the second signal. With the hissing of twenty tons of white-hot steel suddenly tempered, the great cylinder had plunged out of sight. A man, marking the time, shouted in Dick's ear : "Sommers gun in bath!" CHAPTER VII. THE BAGOL COAST AGAIN. "Then you must go back to Bagol?" "Yes, at once — on the midnight train." "That is, in less than an hour?" "Yes." Frances and Dick were alone together at last, in the drawing-room of the Durant home. They had hurried thither directly from the works. Mr. Durant, who had come home with them, had now deserted the two young people as they came down together to the drawingroom. But, though both were smiling and trying to be light-hearted and cheerful, a strange quiet — almost a shadow of some threatening circumstance — seemed to be over them. The telegrams which had brought Dick full, official information of the trouble in his department of the Philippines, and which ordered him back to his post immediately, lay opened upon the table. They were crisp, curt, impersonal. Dick was not thinking of them. "Can't you tell me what's the trouble, Mr. Sommers ?" Frances asked hir sweetly. Dick brushed back his short, thic' hair with one hand, and smiled apolo getically. "I'm sorry," he said. "Te years now, and some fighting, more o less, all the time. But still, I'm no used to it." "Oh, I'm sorry I said anything! Bu the only men hurt — or killed — were ii the army, I thought. I didn't know yoil knew them." "I didn't — very well ; I knew onh two of them. Jenkins — Jimmie Jen ! kins of C Company ; and Atwood, lieu tenant in H Company. Besides, I'rr afraid it isn't so much that I know them, Miss Durant," he confessec quietly, "as — as " "Yes?" "Well, as it is that it's my fault that they — that any one had to get hurt, or killed, over there in Bagol now !" he said frankly. "For, you see, they put me down there at Bagol two years ago just precisely to guard against this ; and I haven't done it." "But. Mr. Sommers !" expostulated Frances. "Surely you can't blame yourself for this ! You told me at Manila that you knew it was coming; everyone over there knew it was coming. No one expected you to be able to prevent this !" "Perhaps not entirely to prevent it, Miss Durant; but Jenkins, Atwood — all those men killed over there were ambushed. They were new to Bagol and the ways over there. I was put there and kept there for two years, to find out and follow up things, and to warn the men against just such surprises ; and then, when they needed me — I'm running off to please myself !" "That's not fair to yourself !" cried Frances, impatient with him. "You weren't running off just to please yourself, at all. You had come to see to the finishing of a great new gun for the government — which wouldn't bring you a cent !" Dick laughed. "Oh, had I?" He had become suddenly a boy for an instant, to tease her. "Oh. yes ; I remember that was the excuse with the department ; but I didn't try to tell you, at least, that it was so !" Frances colored prettily. "Then, even if you were coming to see me," she returned defiantly, "if that's what you mean, I don't see why you shouldn't, if you wanted to. You've