Occasionally dark figures moved on the road ahead of us, but too far away to be recognizable. Presently a man passed us, running uphill—a tall man whose nightshirt hung out of his trousers, down below his coat, identifying him as a resident.
“They’ve finished the bank and are at Medcraft’s!” he yelled as he went by.
“Medcraft is the jeweler,” the girl informed me.
The sloping under our feet grew less sharp. The houses—dark but with faces vaguely visible here and there at windows—came closer together. Below, the flash of a gun could be seen now and then—orange streaks in the rain.
Our road put us into the lower end of the main street just as a staccato rat-ta-tat broke out.
I pushed the girl into the nearest doorway, and jumped in after her.
Bullets ripped through walls with the sound of hail tapping on leaves.
That was the thing I had taken for an exceptionally heavy rifle—a machine gun.
The girl had fallen back in a corner, all tangled up with something. I helped her up. The something was a boy of seventeen or so, with one leg and a crutch.
“It’s the boy who delivers papers,” Princess Zhukovski said, “and you’ve hurt him with your clumsiness.”
The boy shook his head, grinning as he got up.
“No’m, I ain’t hurt none, but you kind of scared me, jumping on me like that.”