“First taste,” he said grimly. “This go on all day. How you like that? Now—you read?”
“No!” thundered the victim.
Then something else thundered. Crack! Crack! The barbarian with the hot iron pitched heavily forward, shot through the brain, while another of those holding Sandgate shared the same fate. Crack! Crack! Not a moment of interval—down went two more, and those immediately next to the prisoners; then two more in the same way. Instinctively the others sprang back, realising that this was the point of danger; but still that unceasing fire went on pitilessly decimating them. Wildly they looked at the point whence it came, but vainly, for the morning mist had so thickened that they could but dimly see the outline of the rocks which overhung the back of the hollow. A great and thunderous roar, accompanying a hail of heavy slugs into the very thick of them, completed their discomfiture. With a wholesome recollection of the artillery practice some of them had witnessed on the banks of the Tsolo River not long before, they cried that the Amapolise were upon them, and disappeared helter-skelter into the mist and the bush at the lower side of the hollow.
Our two friends could hardly believe in their good fortune. Yet—no escape was to be theirs. A man was beside them—a black man—and in his hand a knife. They would be murdered, of course, in the hour of rescue. But—he was cutting their bonds.
“Quick! Come with me,” he said in English, at the same time collecting the Police carbines and revolvers lying on the ground, which the panic-stricken Kafirs had omitted to carry away. Him they followed—Sandgate limping painfully—as he led the way to the rocks above, where, ensconced in a cleft which commanded the hollow beneath, Harley Greenoak sat coolly refilling the magazine of a Winchester repeating rifle, while an old elephant gun of enormous calibre lay on the ground beside him.
“You’re well out of that,” he said, hardly looking up. “Lucky I got back to camp when I did, and John Voss came in at the same time with the notion he had picked up that Pahlandhle’s crowd were particularly on the look-out for express-riders. I formed my plan there and then; borrowed Mainwaring’s Winchester—dashed bad shooting-gun it is too—and, with John Voss’s old elephant roer to give the idea of artillery, why—brought the whole thing off. Even then the mist counted for something.”
In the last-named both now recognised one of the smartest native detectives attached to the F.A.M. Police.
“Come along,” went on Greenoak, rising. “We must get on with those despatches. No time to lose.”
“But—they are lost,” said Sandgate, wearily.
“No, they ain’t. John’s got ’em.”