“He’s all that,” said Greenoak. “We shall find your crowd all safe, never fear.”
A little more than an hour’s sharp riding and they topped the last rise. There stood the homestead, white in the moonlight. An exclamation of relief escaped Waybridge. But on a nearer approach this feeling was dashed.
“There’s been a fight,” he said quickly. “Those are dead Kafirs, and, there are no lights showing.”
The dark, motionless forms lying in front of the house, and discernible in the moonlight, told their own tale. What other motionless forms would they find within? Instinctively they put their horses at a gallop now.
“Easy, easy!” warned Greenoak; “that line of quince hedge may cover any number. We don’t need to rush bang headlong into a trap.”
The warning told. Wildly excited as the men were now, such was the influence of its utterer that they slackened pace. Waybridge thought he had never known what tense, poignant anxiety was until that moment.
“I’ll go forward and make sure,” he said thickly. “If—if—anything has happened in there—it can’t matter what happens to me, and—”
He rammed the spurs into his horse’s flanks. But before he had shot ahead fifty yards, a sight met his eyes—met the eyes of all of them—which caused such a wild burst of relief that it could only find vent in a ringing cheer.
Upon the stoep several figures were now standing, and prominent among them the tall form of Dick Selmes. Harley Greenoak, whose feeling of relief was certainly not inferior to that of the others, shook a disapproving head.
“We want to bring this off quietly,” he said. “We don’t want to let the whole Gaika nation know we’re here, and that’s about what all this hullabaloo is likely to effect.”