“Get them then,” he said, “and that at once. I’ll be responsible for those who are too out of luck to get them for themselves. Get them, and roll up here as soon as ever you can. Not a minute to lose.”
To describe the state of excitement that prevailed is rather beyond our strength. Most of the men were wiry, hard-bitten prospectors, some of them, as the speaker had put it, ‘out of luck,’ a euphemism for out of funds, others were doing a spell of taking it easy, but all were enthusiastic to join. But all stared at Lamont with wonder. He whom they had never known other than the soul of coolness, and reticence, and caution, was now on fire. His eyes seemed to blaze from his colourless face, his voice trembled with its earnestness as he drove home his appeal to them by drawing a picture of these two helpless women, refined and daintily raised, at the mercy of—in the power of—these black fiends; of whose ‘mercy’ in such cases, he and those with him had, with their own eyes, just beheld a sample.
“I say, Lamont,” began Orwell, most of the men having gone away to effect their preparations, “don’t you think you’re rather over-estimating the risk. You know you’re tired and excited, and all that.”
“No, I don’t. I know what I’m about, and I know what I’ve seen. I tell you, Orwell, if you’d listened to me a fortnight ago instead of loftily pooh-poohing everything I told you, it might have made a lot of difference.”
“What’s all this scare-mongering about,” began another man who had just entered. “Here they are telling me, Lamont, that you’re organising an expedition to go to the relief of the Fullertons. Why, man, they’ve got a dozen of our police with them.”
The speaker was Isard’s subaltern. Isard himself was out on a patrol just then.
“All serene, Blackmore. If they had a hundred of your police they might not have one too many. At any rate I’ve served against the wily Matabele. I don’t know whether you have.”
“Er—perhaps not. Still you can’t want so many men. We’ve none too many left for the defence of the town.”
“Oh, damn the defence of the town! These two helpless women are in the heart of the country. They ought never to have been allowed to move from here. Fullerton’s a bigger fool than even I took him for.”
“How about Ancram?” struck in Peters, anxious to avert a breeze. “Shall we take him?”