“You haven’t got it up yet? Well, if you’ll take my advice you’ll set about it at once. It isn’t a case of ‘another of Lamont’s scares’ this time,” he added, with somewhat excusable bitterness. “By the way, Foster, you might bring us another bottle of the same. Oh, and you’ll join us again.”
“Thanks. But, Mr Lamont, for God’s sake, say what has happened. We are a trifle interested too, as well as our officials, and I, for one, have got a wife and family into the bargain.”
The hotel-keeper was a very good fellow, and he and Lamont liked each other. Said the latter—
“Quite right, Foster. Fetch the liquid first and then you shall hear all about it. It’s time everyone knew, but I don’t want to create a panic. One of ‘Lamont’s scares.’”
Orwell looked rather foolish.
“Oh, don’t keep harping on that, old chap,” he said. “We are all liable to make mistakes, and I, for one, am the first to own it. And now the first thing to do is to organise a defence committee, and set to work with a will.”
Then, as the hotel-keeper returned, Lamont started to narrate all that had befallen, the attack on Peters, then on the homestead, and how they had stood off the savages until night.
“They must have found dynamite while looting,” he said, “for soon after we’d left we heard the devil of an explosion.”
He continued his narrative shortly and succinctly. When he got to the massacre of the Tewsons, his listeners grew white with horror.
“Yes. We saw what we don’t want to see again, and would like to forget we ever had seen. And now we’d better get hold of the best men here, Orwell, and fix up a plan. Jennings and Fullerton, and some of the others.”