Sheldon promptly swerved to the left to seek similar shelter, when the faint crack of a rifle came to his ears, and almost immediately the bullet, striking the hard sand a hundred feet beyond him, ricochetted and whined onward on a second flight, convincing him that, preposterous and unreal as it was, it was nevertheless sober fact.
Just as he emerged, stepping out a pace, a rifle cracked to his right, and though he did not hear the bullet in passing, the thud of it came to his ears when it struck a palm-trunk farther on.
"'Twas the last charge in my horn and the last
bullet in my pouch, and 'twas the act of a boy!" he said; "what mattered it whether he struck the rock living or dead!
But at the first heave we heard a bullet zip- zipping past us on the water, followed by the faint report of a rifle.
"Ay tank you fish patrol fallers never ban so lucky as when you sail with Ole Ericsen," he was saying, when a rifle cracked sharply astern, and a bullet gouged along the newly painted cabin, glanced on a nail, and sang shrilly onward into space.
But what, in addition to the tell-tale
bullet, appeared to fix the ruthless deed with peculiar certainty on the trapper, was the accumulated evidence furnished by the trail; which proved, notwithstanding his deadly hurt, that the wounded man had still been able to make a long and desperate resistance to the subsequent efforts of his murderer.
Before landing, I had the men substitute soft
bullets for the steel-jacketed projectiles with which their belts and magazines were filled.
"They killed him with the sash," said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau protested: "Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a sash.
"I suppose," said Flambeau, "that you've got some notion in your head, but it won't easily get the bullet out of his.
The Englishman slid to the bottom of the canoe as a bullet whizzed above him.
His finger closed upon the trigger--there was a flash and a report, and Malbihn's giant frame jerked to the impact of another bullet.
But the fact which clearly opened my eyes to the true state of the case, was the affair of the
bullet, found by Mr.