Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

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There they stood: the lean, little Scotsman with his brows frowning and a grin breaking on his mouth, looking down on Apache Kid, making the drollest distorted face imaginable; Apache Kid looking up at him, his head a little on one side, his eyes dancing with merriment.

And then, in the chirring silence outside, we heard the rattle, rattle, rattle of a pump-car abruptly break out and come smartly nearer.

I stepped out and there, just whirling round the bend, were four men on a pump-car, two going up and two going down, two up and two down, with a precipitancy that must have been something of a record.

A little later on in the day I was to see a pump-car driven as swiftly, but I had never before seen such action. It thrilled me. There was something magnificent in the rising and falling bodies, two forward, two to rear, coming thus, rattling, on the jump, into quiet Black Kettle. The first glimpse of the pump-car and the men suggested some pre-historic beast, come awake in these sunny sand-hills after a sleep of a million years, and cavorting down on the little depôt. Up and down went the bodies and then the pump-car rattled alongside the platform, one of the men snapped "Whoa!" and all four clung to the handles that had been going up and down for fourteen miles and stopped their motion. But before the car stopped, one of the men (who had been pumping facing the direction in which the car was urged) stooped carefully, to avoid a hit on the head from the still rising and falling pump-handles, lifted a little black bag and a jacket, and stepped neatly off to the platform. He was pouring with sweat. His white shirt clung to him and showed a solid, square little chest. In his mouth he held, daintily with his teeth, a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses. This was "the Doc."