In the Quarter | Page 7

Thaxton, "the cavalry -- they've charged -- run!" Gethryn glanced over his shoulder. All along the edge of the frantic, panic-stricken crowd the gleaming crests of the cavalry surged and dashed like a huge wave of steel.
Cries, groans, and curses rose and were drowned in the thunder of the charging horses and the clashing of weapons.
"Spy!" screamed a voice in his ear. Gethryn turned, but the fellow was legging it for safety.
Suddenly he saw a woman who, pushed and crowded by the mob, stumbled and fell. In a moment he was by her side, bent over to raise her, was hurled upon his face, rose blinded by dust and half-stunned, but dragging her to her feet with him.
Swept onward by the rush, knocked this way and that, he still managed to support the dazed woman, and by degrees succeeded in controlling his own course, which he bent toward the Obelisk. As he neared the goal of comparative safety, exhausted, he suffered himself and the woman to be carried on by the rush. Then a blinding flash split the air in front, and the crash of musketry almost in his face hurled him back.
Men threw up their hands and sank in a heap or spun round and pitched headlong. For a moment he swayed in the drifting smoke. A blast of hot, sickening air enveloped him. Then a dull red cloud seemed to settle slowly, crushing, grinding him into the earth.
Three
When Gethryn unclosed his eyes the dazzling sunlight almost blinded him. A thousand grotesque figures danced before him, a hot red vapor seemed to envelop him. He felt a dull pain in his ears and a numb sensation about the legs. Gradually he recalled the scene that had just passed; the flying crowd lashed by that pitiless iron scourge; the cruel panic; the mad, suffocating rush; and then that crash of thunder which had crushed him.
He lay quite still, not offering to move. A strange languor seemed to weigh down his very heart. The air reeked with powder smoke. Not a breath was stirring.
Presently the numbness in his knees changed to a hot, pricking throb. He tried to move his legs, but found he could not. Then a sudden thought sent the blood with a rush to his heart. Perhaps he no longer had any legs! He remembered to have heard of legless men whose phantom members caused them many uncomfortable sensations. He certainly had a dull pain where his legs belonged, but the question was, had he legs also? The doubt was too much, and with a faint cry he struggled to rise.
"The devil!" exclaimed a voice close to his head, and a pair of startled eyes met his own. " The devil!" repeated the owner of the eyes, as if to a apostrophize some particular one. He was a bird-like little fellow, with thin canary-colored hair and eyebrows and colorless eyes, and he was seated upon a campstool about two feet from Gethryn's head.
He blinked at Gethryn. "These Frenchmen," said he, "have as many lives as a cat."
"Thanks!" said Gethryn, smiling faintly.
"An Englishman! The devil!" shouted the pale-eyed man, hopping in haste from his campstool and dropping a well-thumbed sketching-block as he did so.
"Don't be an ass," suggested Gethryn; "you'd much better help me to get up."
"Look here," cried the other, "how was I to know you were not done for?"
"What's the matter with me?" said Gethryn. "Are my -- my legs gone?"
The little man glanced at Gethryn's shoes.
No, they're all there, unless you originally had more than the normal number -- in fact I'm afraid -- I think you're all right.
Gethryn stared at him.
"And what the devil am I to do with this sketch?" he continued, kicking the fallen block. "I've been at it for an hour. It isn't half bad, you know. I was going to call it `Love in Death.' It was for the London Illustrated Mirror."
Gethryn lay quite still. He had decided the little fellow was mad.
"Dead in each other's arms!" continued the stranger, sentimentally. "She so fair -- he so brave -- "
Gethryn sprang up impatiently, but only a little way. Something held him down and he fell back.
"Do you want to get up?" asked the stranger.
"I should rather think so."
The other bent down and placed his hands under Gethryn's arms, and -- half helped, half by his own impatient efforts -- Rex sat up, leaning against the other man. A sharp twinge shot through the numbness of his legs, and his eyes, seeking the cause, fell upon the body of a woman. She lay across his knees, apparently dead. Rex remembered her now for the first time.
"Lift her," he said weakly.
The little man with some difficulty succeeded in moving the body; then Gethryn, putting one arm around the other's neck, struggled up. He