“‘The Lord is King,’” quoted with a sneer, the man just taken to task, to his neighbour on the other side. “But it seems to me that old Thornhill’s pup is king over Him.”
“Meaning yourself?”
“Oh, you’re so damn funny, Bridson. You’ll bust yourself if you don’t watch it,” rejoined the other resentfully.
Hyland, the while, was occupying himself by drawing a cross-nick with a pocket-knife on the apex of each of his Lee-Metford bullets. The gun was a rifle and smooth bore, and with a heavy charge of Treble A in the shot barrel, was calculated, as he put it, to stop the devil himself at no distance; anyhow many black devils would probably undergo the experiment before the day was an hour older. He had just finished on the last bullet when something caused him to throw up his head, rigid and motionless, listening intently. He had caught the faintest possible suspicion of that unique sound—the quiver of assegai hafts.
“Pass the word round ‘Stand by’,” he whispered to each of his neighbours. One ignored it—he recently rated, to wit. Who the devil was young Thornhill, to come here skippering the whole ship? he wanted to know—to himself.
Hyland was sighting his piece. In the fast lightening dawn his keen vision had detected a tongue of dark figures flitting stealthily out of the mimosa bushes some couple of hundred yards away—and striking out a line which should bring them round to the back of the entrenchment. This was the encircling manoeuvre, he decided. And then he let go.
But the detonation, and the wild yell of more than one stricken savage—for he had fired into them bunched up—was drowned by an appalling roar, as a dense mass sprang up among the low bushes on that front, and, waving shield and assegai, charged straight for the earthwork.
“Aim low—aim low,” was each man’s injunction to his neighbour as the firearms crashed: in the semi-light making a circle of jetting flame. With effect too, for the front rows went down like mown corn.
“Ho-ho-ho! Haw-haw! Hooray!” were the varying forms of hoarse guffaw that went up, and the joke was this. Those immediately behind the fallen ones, pressed on over the bodies of the latter, intending to rush the earthwork before the defenders should have time to reload. But they, too, went down in sheaves, and that before another shot had been fired. They had got into an entanglement of barbed wire, which had been stealthily and quickly fixed round the defences the night before, but after dark, lest the watchful eyes of scouts should perceive it and so prepare their countrymen, for this surprise. And now the surprise was complete.
“Give it ’em again!” shouted Hyland, setting the example. This time the fire was not directed upon those who had fallen among the wire entanglement, but on those immediately behind them. The effect was awful. The whole roaring, struggling mass fell back upon itself—then, dropping to the ground, glided away like snakes among the long grass, and many were picked off while doing so. Then, those especially who had shot-guns, played upon those who were trying to extricate themselves from the wires. They could not take prisoners, and they had their families to defend. The odds were tremendous against them: it was necessary to read the enemy a severe lesson, to inflict upon him a stunning loss. Hyland Thornhill for one, the probable fate of his father clouding his brain as with lurid flame, raked the struggling bodies again and again with charges of heavy buckshot. The carnage was ghastly, sickening, but—necessary. The alternative was the massacre of themselves and of their women and children.