"Giuseppe," he gasped. "Take us away from here fast!
Very fast." This was the sort of appeal that went directly to the driver's heart. He spun the big car so nimbly that the Count's considerably weakened legs collapsed and he fell backwards onto the leather seat.
Spread over a front of a quarter of a mile behind and on each side of the Rolls came thirty of the dun coloured Fiat troop-carriers.
Despite their most fervent efforts, they had lost ground steadily to the thrusting Rolls and they now lumbered along almost a thousand yards behind. However, the excitement of the chase had affected the occupants and they had climbed up on the cabs and cupolas, and hung there hooting and yelling as they watched the sport, like runners at a fox hunt.
This solid phalanx of vehicles, advancing almost wheel to wheel over the rough ground, at a speed which would have horrified the manufacturers, was suddenly faced with the urgent necessity of reversing its headlong career without any loss of speed.
The drivers of the two leading trucks whose need was most critical solved the problem by spinning_ the wheels to hard lock, one left and the other right, and they came together radiator to radiator at a combined speed in excess of sixty miles per hour. In a roaring cloud of steam, splintering glass and rending metal, their cargoes of black shirted infantry men were scattered like wheat upon the earth, or impaled on various metal projections of the vehicle bodies. The trucks, inextricably locked into each other, settled slowly on their shattered suspensions, and no sooner had the dust begun to drift away than there was a belly baking thump as the contents of their shattered fuel tanks ignited in a tall volcanic spout of flame and black smoke.
The other vehicles managed to reverse their courses without serious collision and streamed away into their own dust-clouds, pursued by a horde of galloping, gibbering cavalry.
Count Aldo Belli could not bring himself to glance back over his shoulder, certain that he would find a razor-edged sword swishing inches from his cringing rear, and he leaned over his driver, spurring him to greater speed by beating on his unprotected head and shoulders with a fist clenched like a hammer.
"Faster!" shouted the Count, his fine baritone rising to an uncertain contralto. "Faster, you idiot or I will have you shod" and he hit the driver again behind one ear, experiencing a small spark of relief as the Rolls overtook the rear vehicles in the disordered herd of fleeing trucks.
Now at last he judged it safe to look back, and his relief was more intense when he realized that the Rolls was easily capable of out
-running a mounted man. He experienced a warm flood of returning courage.
"My rifle, Gino," he shouted. "Give me my rifle." But the Sergeant was trying to focus his camera on the pursuing horde, and the Count hit him a blow over the top of his head.
"Idiot. This is war," he bellowed. "And I am a warrior give me my rifle!" Giuseppe, the driver, hearing him, reluctantly decided that he was expected to slow the Rolls to give the Count an opportunity to follow his warlike intentions but, at the first diminution of speed, he received another lusty crack on the centre of his pate and the Count's voice went shrill again.
"Idiot," he screeched. "Do you want to get us killed?
Faster, man, faster!" and with unbounded relief the driver pushed his foot flat on the throttle and the Rolls leapt forward again.
Gino was down on his hands and knees at the Count's feet, and now he came up with the Mannlicher in his hands and handed it to the Count.
"It's loaded, my Count."
"Brave boy!" The Count braced himself with the rifle held at his hip, and looked about for something to shoot at.
The Ethiopian cavalry had fallen well behind at this stage, and the Rolls had overtaken most of the troop-carriers they were between the Count and the enemy. The Count was considering ordering Giuseppe to work his way out on to the flank, and thus give him an open field of fire weighing the pleasure of shooting down the black riders at a respectable range against any possible physical danger to himself and he turned on his precarious perch in the back seat to look out in that direction.
He stared incredulously at what he saw. Two great humpbacked shapes were sailing in across the open grassland. They looked like two deformed camels, coming on swiftly with a curious loping progress that was at once comical and yet dreadfully menacing.
The Count stared at them uncomprehendingly, until with a sudden jolt of shock and a new warm flood of adrenalin into his bloodstream, he realized that the two strange vehicles were moving fast enough and at such an angle as to cut off his retreat.
"Giuseppe!" he shrieked, and hit the driver with the butt of the Marmlicher. It was not a heavy blow, it was meant merely to attract his attention, but Giuseppe had already taken much punishment and was by now lightly concussed.
He clung to the wheel with white knuckles and roared on directly into the path of the new enemy.
"Giuseppe!" shrieked the Count again, as he suddenly recognized the gaily coloured flashes on the turret of the nearest machine, and at the same instant saw the thick stubby cylindrical shape that protruded ahead of it. It was fluted vertically and at the far end a short pipe like muzzle thrust out of the heavy water-jacket.
"Oh, merciful Mother of God!" he howled as the machine altered course slightly and the muzzle of the Vickers machine gun pointed directly at him.
"You fool!" he shrieked at Giuseppe, hitting him again.
"Turn! You idiot, turn!" Suddenly through the tears of pain, the singing in his ears, and the blinding terror that gripped him, Giuseppe saw the huge camel-like shape looming up ahead of him and he spun the wheel again just as the muzzle of the Vickers erupted in a fluttering pillar of bright flame and the air all around them was torn by the hiss and crack of a thousand bull whips.
Castelani stood on the cab of his truck, and peered disapprovingly through his binoculars into the distant clouds of rolling dust where confused movement and shadowy indistinguishable shapes flitted without seeming purpose or pattern.
It had required all of his presence and authority to restrain the ten trucks which carried the artillery men and towed their field pieces, to keep them under his personal command and to prevent them joining in the wildly enthusiastic rush after the small contingent of Ethiopian horsemen.
Castelani was about to give the order to mount up and cautiously follow the Count's charge into history and glory, when he raised the binoculars again and it seemed that the pattern of dust-obscured movement out there had altered. Suddenly he saw the unmistakable shape of a Fiat transport emerge from the dust bank, and move ponderously back towards him. Through the glasses the men who clung to the canvas roof were all staring back in the direction from which they were coming at speed.
He panned the glasses slowly and saw another truck lumber out of the dust-mist headed back towards him. One of the soldiers on its roof was aiming and firing his rifle back into the obscuring clouds and his comrades, clinging to the roof about him, were frozen in attitudes of trepidation and alarm.
At that moment, Castelani heard something which he recognized instantly, his skin prickling at the distant ripping tearing sound.
The sound of a British Vickers machine gun.
His eye sought the direction, turning swiftly to the right flank of the extended Italian column which seemed now to be rushing back towards him in confused and completely disordered retreat.