"Who was it?" asked Jim.
"It must have been Cortes or Fernando," answered Harry, "but I can see no sign of them. I expect one or the other will show himself in a minute."
They waited for several minutes. At last Urquhart could bear the suspense no longer. He lifted his hands to his mouth and let out a long-drawn shout.
His voice was echoed from the hills, which were now wrapped in clouds, but no voice came back in answer.
"I can't understand it," he exclaimed.
Braid admitted that the whole thing was something of a mystery, for which he could offer no sort of explanation.
And then, on a sudden, they saw a white-clad figure dashing over the rocks. It was a man who came down from the mountain-side, fleet and sure of foot. Upon his head he wore a turban. He was dressed in robes of flowing white, and in his hand he carried a rifle.
Harry directed his field-glasses upon this extraordinary figure. Beyond the fact that he was a tall man with a great black beard, he could see little or nothing, by reason of the prodigious pace at which the man was travelling. One thing, however, was perfectly certain: that this man—who apparently was the marksman who had so effectively scattered the Germans—was not one of the half-caste guides.
The running man came closer and closer, and the boys thought at first that he was about to approach to within speaking distance of themselves. But he turned off sharply to the left and disappeared in a belt of trees almost as suddenly as he had come.
They waited for some minutes, thinking that he would show up again; but that was the last they saw of him for some days, and it was not until then that they discovered who he was. He came and vanished like a thunderbolt that spreads destruction in its path. His rifle had spoken at dawn, and almost every shot had been the signal for the death of a human being. He came, and killed, and vanished. He was a three-day mystery of the wild hills of the German Cameroons.