The Gates of Morning

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Resting his rifle carefully on the gunnel, Rantan led off. He couldn’t well miss, and the deafening explosion of the rifle was followed by a shriek and a movement in the distant bushes where some unfortunate had been hit, and, striving to rise, had been pulled down by his or her companions.

Carlin laughed and fired and evidently missed, to judge by the silence that followed the shot.

Rantan had some trouble with a cartridge. His face had quite changed within the last few minutes and since the corralling of the natives was assured. It was like a mask and the upper lip projected as though suddenly swollen by some injury. He flung the defective cartridge away, loaded with another and fired.

The shot was followed by the cry of a woman and the wailing of a child. One could guess that the child had been hit, not the woman it belonged to, for the wailing kept on and on, a sound shocking in that solitude where nothing was to be seen but the empty beach, the line of mammee apple and the glimpse of empty sea beyond and through the trees.

Carlin, more brutal but less terrible than Rantan, laughed. He was about to fire when a form suddenly moving and breaking from the trees took his eye and stayed his hand.

It was Dick. In his left hand he held a bow and in his right a sheaf of arrows. Aioma had directed that before taking cover the bows and arrows should be laid by the westermost of the two big trees that he and Dick had chosen for shelter. Dick had only to stretch out his arm to seize the weapons and armed with them he came, leaving shelter behind him, right into the open and on to the sands.

At the cry of the first victim, he had started and shivered all over like a dog; at the voice of the child thought left him, or only the thought that there, amongst the bushes with the children and the women, was Katafa; seizing a bow and a handful of the arrows, he left the tree and came out on to the beach and right down to the waterside.

There were seven arrows. He cast them on the sand, picked up one and fixed it with the notch in the bow-string; as he did so Carlin, altering his aim from the bushes to this new target, fired. The sand spurted a yard to the right of the bowman, who, drawing the arrow till the barb nearly touched the bow shaft, loosed it.

It fell true in line but yards short, and as it flicked the water, Rantan’s bullet came plung into the sand and only three inches from Dick’s right foot.

Dick laughed. Like Rantan’s, his face was transfigured.