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The trench was reached, and again the clamour of voices raised in fear and pain, the hoarse rancour of hate, the shrill agony of death, rose high on the sounds of battle. The rush swept up on the trench, engulfed it as a wave engulfs the cleft on a rock beach, boiled and eddied about it, and then . . . and then . . . swept roaring over it, and on.

Yet just now, the man whose silent smile could give birth to such sweeping potentialities did nothing more significant than gaze absently at the tide of life which eddied through Broadway's cañon and at the disintegrating tombstones which spoke of death in the shadow of Trinity.

But the doomed dwellings crackled and flashed, and every time a beam or a ceiling fell in, the heavens were brilliant with the great bursts of sparks, which eddied and rose higher and higher, to join the great cloud floating quietly toward the now golden river.

In a moment McLean and Barker were sundered from each other in this flood. Barker, sucked in toward the centre but often eddied back by those who meant to help him, heard the mixed explanations pass his ear unfinished versions, contradictions, a score of facts. It had been wolf-poison. It had been "Rough on Rats." It had been something in a bottle.

His cheery, good-natured face was suddenly dark and scowling. "Let them try, that's all. It's Protopopoff who's our enemy not the Cossacks." And a woman near him repeated. "Yes, yes, it's Protopopoff. Hurrah for the Cossacks!" I was squeezed now into a corner, and the crowd swirled and eddied about me in a tangled stream, slow, smiling, confused, and excited.

Above, below, around, the snow eddied like a fairy torrent, beating against the solid walls and curling in curious ringed swirls about its buttresses as water beats about a rock in midstream. But the dominant grey of the outside world cast no appreciable reflection on the spirits of Madame de Sagan's guests, with whom gaiety and wild devices for killing time were necessary and familiar things.

The dust rose in clouds and eddied in the sun. We slouched easily in our saddles. The cowboys compared notes as to the brands they had seen. Our ponies shuffled along, resting, but always ready for a dash in chase of an occasional bull calf or yearling with independent ideas of its own.

"Yes," I said; "men would be hard to catch." "A woman needs it most," he murmured. He lay down again in his lounging sprawl, with his grave eyes intently fixed upon my fly-casting. The gradual day mounted up the hills farther from the floor of earth. Warm airs eddied in its wake slowly, stirring the scents of the plain together.

The indistinct figure on board did not move, but the craft swerved again and the gun pointed straight up the channel. Jake did not know if this was significant or not, because the current eddied, but he imagined the fellow had seen him. Then Jim threw his gun to his shoulder and a red flash leaped from the muzzle.

It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying aloft; it took the house by the four corners and shook it to loosening the rafters, and I felt the chair rock under me; it rumbled down the chimney as if it would tear the life out of us.