The firing had ceased automatically on both sides, and a bombardment of sticks, leaves, sand and stones pelted them all unmercifully. It was impossible to face the wind; indeed, so violent was the torrent of air, that the mere act of taking breath became a matter of the nicest art.
The girl lay crouched under the huddle of bedding, buffetted into semi-unconsciousness, with Carter's arm holding her tight down to the floor boards of the veranda. He put his lips to her ear and bawled a message. She shook her head. Through the insane yell of the wind she could not hear a word. He laughed and kissed her, and then, taking away his protecting arm, worked his perilous way like some clinging, creeping thing into the inside of the dwelling.
Even this was filled with the wind. A door, smashed from its hinges, clattered noisily about in one corner, as though it had been some uncouth mechanical toy propelled by clumsy clockwork. Everything movable hopped on the floor, or danced from the walls. And of course to this disorder was added all the dishevelment which had been caused by the volleys of jagged cast iron fired through the flimsy walls by the Okky men's flintlocks. But Carter knew what he wanted, and sought for it with a single mind.
Presently from amongst the _débris_ he emerged with a four-gallon drum; and then he worked his way to a cupboard where Slade kept his store of cigarettes. Luckily it was full. Slade had boarded a steamer lately where his credit in the forecastle shop was still untarnished, and his plausible tongue had procured him a whole two-dozen case of half-hundred tins on some ingenious deferred-payment scheme of his own. There were twenty-two of the green tins left, and Carter got them all out, opened them, and recklessly emptied their contents onto the floor. With infinite pains, and sheltering the liquid from the blast under his coat, he decanted the contents of the big drum into the tins till all were full. Then he re-lidded them, and jabbed a hole with his penknife in each lid.
He rebuilt them into their own wooden case as he primed them, and when this was full, dragged it out through the doorway into the casemate of mattresses. Laura and White-Man's-Trouble still crouched there helplessly, and the tornado still yelled and roared and boomed. It was carrying water with it now, bitter salt from the sea, and whipping the face like hail where it impinged.