“Charge!” shouted Lamont. “Divide. Half of us each side.”
With a wild, roaring cheer the men spurred forward. The assailants did not wait. Uttering loud cries of warning and dismay they fled helter-skelter for more secure cover, and not all reached it, for the irresistible impetus of their charge had carried the rescuers right in among the discomfited Matabele, whom they shot down right and left, well-nigh at point-blank.
“Quick, some of you cut loose those mules,” ordered Lamont. “Steele, you’re a good man at that sort of thing. Three, all told, will be enough.”
In a trice the two wounded leaders were cut loose, the one still kicking being given its quietus. Wyndham, the while, kept to his business as driver with an unswerving attention that no temptation to bear a hand in the fight caused him to lose sight of for a moment, and in an incredibly short space of time the reduced team was on the move again.
Lamont’s glance took in Clare Vidal’s pale, set face with a glow of indescribable relief. She was uninjured, and he noted further that she gripped the revolver he had given her as though she had been using it. She, for her part, was fully appraising this man, whom last she had seen cool, indifferent, rather cynical. Now—grimy, unshaven, fierce-eyed—he was all fire and energy, and she noted further that he seemed in every way as one born to command. The alacrity with which the others sprang to execute his orders did not escape her either—even Jim Steele, whose ambition the other day had been to punch his head.
“Get your mules along as quick as you can, Wyndham,” he said. “We must be a good hour from the Kezane, and when these devils discover we are not the advance guard of a bigger force they’ll make it lively for us again.”
One more quick look, and that was all, then his attention was turned solely and entirely to the matter in hand. Clare Vidal read that look, and was perchance satisfied; anyhow she regarded him—grimy, unshaven, fierce-eyed—with an admiration she had never felt for any living man. The ‘coward’! she said to herself—the man whom her brother-in-law and others had described as a funkstick.
“See here, Lamont,” now sung out Fullerton. “I’m going to get on one of those police horses and help in this racket. I’m dead sick of sitting here.”
For two of the horses of the fallen troopers had been brought on and were being led by the survivors.
“All right. There’ll be no harm in that. Miss Vidal, you’d better get into the back of the waggon and let down the sail. We haven’t done with the enemy yet—and you won’t be such a conspicuous mark when he comes on again.”