"It is too hot to last," said the girl. "I'm afraid even the water in the chattie will be as warm as tea."
She went into the mess-room, and presently came back on hands and knees to keep below the showers of pot-leg which were persistently whistling overhead, and gave him the wet porous bottle, and crouched beside him under the breastwork as he drank.
"Well, my sweetheart," said Carter, "if it isn't unlucky to drink one's best girl's health in water, here's your toast! You're the finest plucked lassie in all the wide and wondrous earth, and now I come to think of it, I don't believe I ever proposed to you."
"No, you never did. I don't see why you should."
"Stick your head lower down. That thing that said 'whisp-whisp!' was a rifle-bullet. They've got a blooming marksman down there, and I can't have you picked off. And don't talk rubbish. You know you're jolly going to marry me as soon as ever we can afford it, if ever we get out of this, which isn't likely." He clapped an arm snugly round her, and _w-o-s-h_ came a load of pot-leg into the other side of the bedding which protected them. "Got any silly objections to make to that?"
"Have you thought over what it means, George? You know I'm not white."
"Bosh! Anyway you're white enough for me. Let go the chattie. And as I said before, Here's luck. Ugh! African river water, half mud, half essence of nigger from higher up. Moreover, as you remarked, hot as tea. Bang! there goes that infernal cannon again, and I've been gossiping with you--proposing, I mean--and haven't seen the flash. Plunked a shot into one of the palm oil puncheons in the store below, by the sound of it. Hullo, here comes the wind. Now, somebody will have his hair combed."
As though the discharge of the ancient brass gun had been a signal, a tornado opened upon them without warning, and almost in its full strength in the first blast.
One minute there was a stagnant calm, with air so hot and stale that it hardly seemed to refresh one to breathe it. The next wind travelling often at a hundred miles an hour bellowed and roared at them in tearing spasms of fury. The factory building reeled and groaned at its impact. Sticks, boards, corrugated roofing and empty barrels solved the problem of aerial flight. The close-grown trees of the forest that hemmed the factory in on the landward side were flattened earthwards as though by the pressure of some unseen giant hand; yes, flattened down, and down, till one thought that any human beings that were beneath them must inevitably be crushed out of all living shape into the foul, soft swampy ground beneath. And in cold truth some of the Okky men who cowered there during the enforced lull of the attack did so die.