I wondered if the retreat to the boat had already started. On the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the bank, I heard the answer to that guess.
High up on the slope, almost up to the edge of the cliff, by the sound, a machine gun began to hurl out its stream of bullets.
Mixed with the racket of the machine gun were the sounds of smaller arms, and a grenade or two.
At the first crossing, I left the main street and began to run up the hill. Men were running toward me. Two of them passed, paying no attention to my shouted, “What’s up now?”
The third man stopped because I grabbed him—a fat man whose breath bubbled, and whose face was fish-belly white.
“They’ve moved the car with the machine gun on it up behind us,” he gasped when I had shouted my question into his ear again.
“What are you doing without a gun?” I asked.
“I—I dropped it.”
“Where’s General Pleshskev?”
“Back there somewhere. He’s trying to capture the car, but he’ll never do it. It’s suicide! Why don’t help come?”
Other men had passed us, running downhill, as we talked. I let the white-faced man go, and stopped four men who weren’t running so fast as the others.
“What’s happening now?” I questioned them.
“They’s going through the houses up the hill,” a sharp-featured man with a small mustache and a rifle said.