was peeping around a boulder. “Swing around back and tell Duffy and Shane to start closing in as soon as they come, letting fly with all they got. Where’s Kimble?”
The peeper jerked a thumb toward a tree beyond him. We could see only the upper part of it from our ditch.
“Tell him to set up his mill and start grinding,” Noonan ordered. “Low, across the front, ought to do it like cutting cheese.”
The peeper disappeared.
Noonan went up and down the ditch, risking his noodle over the top now and then for a look around, once in a while calling or gesturing to his men.
He came back, sat on his heels beside me, gave me a cigar, and lit one for himself.
“It’ll do,” he said complacently. “Whisper won’t have a chance. He’s done.”
The machine-gun by the tree fired, haltingly, experimentally, eight or ten shots. Noonan grinned and let a smoke ring float out of his mouth. The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was. Noonan blew another smoke ring and said:
“That’s exactly what’ll do it.”
I agreed that it ought to. We leaned against the clay bank and smoked while, farther away, another machine-gun got going, and then a third. Irregularly, rifles, pistols, shotguns joined in. Noonan nodded approvingly and said:
“Five minutes of that will let him know there’s a hell.”