But Harry’s brave fellows, he himself at the head of them—he well knew how to climb a hill—took the place with one wild determined rush.
Many of the assaulters were wounded and some were killed with the descending stones, so that their savage instincts got the better of their judgment, and in spite of all that Harry could do, an ugly scene of carnage took place as soon as the fort was captured. Harry had found his men at last. And not a whit too soon, for at the very moment when, waving his victorious sword on high, he scaled the last parapet, they were being ordered out for instant execution.
Ordered out? From what? Out, dear reader, from one of the most loathsome dungeons it is possible to imagine, dark, slimy, dismal, and filled with noisome vapours, a dungeon that for months they had shared with centipedes and slimy, slow-creeping lizards.
And all this time their food had been only raw cassava root and a modicum of half-putrid water.
And now Harry Milvaine, their beloved officer, stood in their midst.
They had not forgotten their discipline, for each and all touched their brows by way of salute.
“My poor fellows?” said Harry, his voice half-choked with emotion.
It was the first kind words they had heard for years. No wonder they broke down, and that those once sturdy British sailors—babies now in their very weakness—sobbed over Harry’s hands or hugged him in their feeble arms.
Harry had been telling Walda that, in all probability, there would be a quarrel with ’Ngaloo about his shipmates, the survivors of the Bunting’s men, and that there would possibly be some fighting.