At the cry there was a shot from without, and a window on the exposed side of the Nadia fell in shivers.  There were yells of terror from the cook’s pantry, and the two negroes came crawling through the side vestibule, their eyes like saucers and their teeth chattering.  Ford jumped up and turned off the Pintsch lights; and he was barely down again when another shot broke a second window.

“Wouldn’t that jolt you?” said Adair.  “They are feeling for you with both hands.  What a heaven’s pity it is that we haven’t so much as a potato popgun among us to talk back with.  What did you see, Mr. Brissac?”

“A crowd of them bunched on the commissary porch.  One of them was sighting a Winchester at the car when I got busy.”

Adair was again lamenting the lack of arms when the negro porter produced a pocket bulldog pistol of the cheap and uncertain sort.  “Y-y-y-yah you is, Mistuh Charles,” he stuttered.

“Ah, Williams—­concealed weapons?  That is fifty dollars fine in your native Tennessee, isn’t it?” Then to Brissac:  “Please go to the farther window and mark down for me, Mr. Brissac.  I don’t like to have those fellows do all the bluffing.”

While the assistant was complying, a third bullet from the commissary porch tore high through the car, smashing one of the gas globes.  Adair crawled to a broken window and the cheap revolver roared like an overloaded musket.

“Good shot!” said Brissac, from his marking post.  “You got one of them:  he’s down and they’re dragging him inside.  Now they have all ducked to cover.”

“That settles any notion of a palaver and the pipe of peace, I guess,” said Adair, as indifferently as if he had just brought down a clay pigeon.  “Prophesy, Stuart:  what comes next?”

Ford shook his head.

“They can’t quit now till they are sure I am permanently obliterated; they have gone too far.  They’ll credit me with that shot of yours, and they will take it as a pretty emphatic proof that I still live.  Hence, more war.”

“Well, what do we do?  You are the captain.”

“Picket the car and keep a sharp lookout for the next move.  Brissac, you take the forward end, and I’ll take the rear platform.  Adair, post your Africans in here where they’ll do the most good, and see that they don’t go to sleep on their jobs.”

The disposition of forces was quickly made, after which suspense set in.  Silence and the solitude of the deserted camp reigned unbroken; yet the watchers knew that the shadows held determined enemies, alertly besieging the private car.  To prove it, Adair pulled down a portiere, gave it bulk with a stuffing of berth pillows, and dropped the bundle from one of the shattered windows.  Three jets of fire belched from the nearest shadow, and the dummy was riddled.  Adair fired at one of the flashes, resting the short-barreled pistol across the window ledge, and the retaliatory shot brought Ford hurrying in from his post.