I touched the stone above me with my fingers; and when I felt it moving, I knew that the hour of my ordeal was come. I must fight and defend myself, or die--and very likely both. I rose as the stone was lifted, and, as I did so, placed the Spaniard's helmet on my head and took up the rusted sword.
Amos threw aside the slab, and then jumped backward, as I stood up in the grave, waist-deep in mother earth.
It was that half-light which is neither night nor day--a weird and ghostly light, pervading like a mist the shadows of the Wood. Small wonder that that evil man thought that he beheld the resurrection of a corpse!
He let out a shriek--such a shriek as I never heard before or since--that seemed as if it must have been audible for miles throughout the evening silence of the jungle. It was the shriek of one whose hair stands upright on his head. He stood before me quaking at the knees; and then he found his voice again.
"Mercy!" he cried.
And at that I rushed upon him with my sword.
[CHAPTER XXI--I AM MADE A GHOST, AND THEN A FOOL]
I sprang at him with my sword, the rusty blade that I had filched from those grim and whitened bones.
The man was at my mercy. He was unarmed, having laid aside his rifle before he approached the Tomb. He trembled in every limb as he fled before my onslaught, and cried out aloud for pity, as I jabbed at him in a kind of vicious frenzy.
In the twilight his face looked pale-green in colouring, and his little pig-like eyes seemed in danger of springing from his head. It would be difficult to conceive an expression upon which abject terror was more strongly marked.