“Come on, straight at ’em,” were some of the cries in answer to his appeal, and among the confusion and smoke—for the firing was pretty brisk—Claverton and a dozen others, gliding rapidly from bush to bush, revolver in hand, made their way to where the missing man was last seen. And in doing so they went further and further into the most deadly peril, and separated themselves more and more from their retreating comrades; but still they went.
A couple of hundred yards further, and it seemed as if they had even got behind the enemy’s lines. Two or three Kafirs had sprung up before them, but these had been immediately shot down, and, amid the confusion and firing on all sides, they succeeded in breaking through almost unobserved.
“Here’s where I saw him last,” said Claverton. “Jack! Jack!” he called in a low, penetrating tone. “Where are you, man?”
No answer.
A double report, and a couple of bullets came singing over their heads.
“Half-a-dozen of you fellows keep an eye on our rear,” said Claverton. “We shall have them down upon us directly. But we won’t give up yet.”
“Hallo?” cried a faint voice some twenty yards off.
“There he is, by all that’s blue!” exclaimed several. “Hooray?”
There he was sure enough. Lying under a huge, overhanging yellow-wood tree—several of which grew along the course of the small stream flowing through the valley—half hidden away in the long grass, whither he had crawled in the hope of escaping notice, lay poor Jack Armitage, his right foot shattered by a ball, while another had penetrated his side. His only hope was to be allowed to die in peace, though more than once as he lay there, alone with the anguish of his wounds, forgotten and left behind in that wild forest, he had thought of calling out to the savages to come and put an end to him. But hope would again reassert itself, and his own natural buoyancy of spirits, combined with the thought of his young wife, whom he would yet live to return to, made him resolve to cling on at all costs, as he put it. Poor Jack!
The rescuers were none too soon, for just then a Kafir, attracted by his faint shout, glided from behind the trunk of a tree, assegai uplifted; but a couple of revolver bullets, well aimed, stretched him beside his intended victim.