“No; spies.”
“Psh! It’s a disease the men have got. Fancy. Every fellow on duty will be seeing the same thing now. There, that’s enough of it.”
“Look out!” cried Lennox angrily; and then in the same breath, “What’s that?”
For there was a sharp, grating sound as of stone against stone, and then silence.
“Stand fast, every man,” cried Lennox excitedly, seizing his revolver and looking along the broad, rugged shelf upon which they stood in the direction from which the sound had come.
“A lantern here,” cried the captain as a sharp movement was heard, and half-a-dozen men at a word from their officer doubled along the shelf for a couple of dozen yards and then stood fast, while the other end of the path was blocked in the same way.
Lennox’s heart was beating hard with excitement, and he started as he felt Dickenson grip his arm firmly.
Then all stood fast, listening, as they waited for the lantern to be brought. Quite ten minutes of painful silence elapsed before a couple of dim lights were seen approaching, the bearers having to come down from the gun-platform; and when the two non-commissioned officers who bore them approached, and in obedience to orders held them up, they displayed nothing but swarthy, eager-looking faces, and the piled-up rugged and weathered rocks on one side, the black darkness on the other.
“Come this way, sergeant,” said Captain Edwards, and he, as officer in command of the detachment that night, led on, followed closely by Captain Roby and the two subalterns.
They went along in perfect silence, the lanterns here being alternately held up and down so that the rugged shelf and the piled-up masses of rock which formed the nearly perpendicular side of the kopje in that part might be carefully examined.