“Ho! hunting-dogs of the king, here is your game! Usú-tu!” roared Sobuza, whirling his battle-axe aloft as he leaped to meet these new assailants. The latter were led by a chief of gigantic stature and hideous aspect, beneath whose wildly fantastic adornments of flowing cowhair and long trailing crane’s feathers, Gerard, keeping at the side of Sobuza, had no difficulty in recognising Vunawayo.
“Hah!” growled the latter, as the ringed leader came at him. “Now we have men to deal with!”
Gerard, recognising his old enemy, had covered him with his revolver, and drew the trigger. But with incredible quickness Vunawayo bounded aside, and the ball found its billet in the body of a warrior behind him. Before he could fire again, Sobuza had met the leader of the Igazipuza in full shock.
Then it was as a battle of the giants to behold these two. Their shields clashed together, and remained held at arm’s length, pressing against each other as the heads and interlocked horns of two fighting bulls, each striving to beat down the other’s guard, to draw the other’s stroke by a deft and clever feint; and a false stroke would mean the death of whichever should make it. The warriors on either side had rallied around their respective chiefs and champions, to neither of whom could they render any aid by reason of the desperate fierceness wherewith they were themselves pressing each other. Gerard, carried away by the indescribable savagery and excitement of the combat, began himself to “see red,” was hardly, in fact, conscious of his acts. A sharp sting in the ear, as of a red-hot iron, brought him to himself. Grinding his teeth in fury he emptied his rifle point-blank into the body of a warrior whose assegai stroke had so narrowly missed him, then he was knocked down by the violent contact of a great shield. The bearer of it had raised his spear to strike when he himself was felled by a blow of a battle-axe, and at the same time Gerard was seized by friendly hands and set upon his feet again. Half dazed he continued to load and fire. He saw men stagger beneath their death wound and sink to the earth, now foul and slippery with gore. He saw others almost hacked to pieces as they stood, and then fall to their knees, still thrusting and stabbing as long as there was life in them; but ever the deafening roar of the opposing war-cries, the tossing of weapons and shields, the blows and the gasping, and the spouting blood. It could not last—it could not last.
Even the desperate valour of the Igazipuza, together with the fact that they were on higher ground, for they had charged down upon the king’s impi, could not avail for long against the superior numbers of the latter. Vunawayo, finding his efforts against Sobuza unavailing, and noting that more and more of the latter’s warriors were free to come to their chief’s assistance, sprang suddenly back, and waving his shield, gave out in thunder tones the order to retreat.
But if the king’s troops imagined that victory was theirs they were destined to be undeceived. All this while the Igazipuza had been pressed farther and farther back until they had nearly reached the top of the ridge, and now as they poured over this in their retreat, through the point where the slopes narrowed to a kind of gateway, the pursuers thundering on their rear were met by a small but fresh force which had been placed there to cover the retreat of the bulk.
“By the head-ring of the Great Great One, but these are abatagati indeed!” growled Sobuza at this fresh evidence of the desperate pertinacity of the enemy. “At them, my children! Hew them down!”
And shouting the king’s war-cry he leaped upon the opposing Igazipuza.
If the fighting had been fierce before, it was doubly so now. This band of heroes in their way, savage, bloodthirsty freebooters as they were, had been placed there in this latter-day Thermopylae, to die—to die in order that the rest might renew the combat under more favourable conditions, and what more formidable foe can there be than a cornered combatant? They went down at last before the Udhloko spears, but the struggle was a fearful one, the result almost man for man. When the victors, panting, bleeding, maddened with bloodshed and fury, stood on the ridge looking down into the hollow upon the Igazipuza kraal, those who had originally withstood them, and of whom they were in pursuit, had disappeared. This would mean hunting them down—hunting down a cornered and desperate foe who had not hesitated to assume the offensive and attack a force twice as strong as itself, and who still mustered in sufficient numbers to be of formidable menace; hunting down such as these, at bay among the bush and rocks of their own stronghold. A redoubtable undertaking indeed.
There lay the great kraal, apparently deserted, for it and its surroundings showed no sign of life. Eagerly Gerard’s glance sought the waggons, and then his heart turned sick. They were still there, but around them also was no sign of life. What had happened? But the next glance was destined to sicken him yet more.