"Rubbish!" said John. "I've been here before."
"But I can't miss the boma if I go straight ahead. I insist on it, old chap; I'm sure it will be best. Hand over your grass and the spirit; I've got matches."
"Your arm's not thoroughly sound yet."
"All the more reason. It doesn't require much muscle to strike a match. Come on; it must be past midnight; there's no time to lose."
John gave him the materials somewhat reluctantly. Ferrier pressed his hand and slid away into the darkness. Time passed very slowly. The men grew fidgety; John heard the strange gulping in their throats, and the little noises they made as they moved worried him, lest they were heard in the camp. True, there were other sounds: the hum of insects, a lion's roar in the distance, the laughing bark of a hyena; but these were momentary, not continuous like the rustling of the grass, which there was no breeze to account for. As minute after minute passed, and there was still no sign, John grew more and more anxious. The boma was less than two hundred yards distant. He durst not strike a light to look at his watch, but surely there had been time to go and come and go again. What was happening?
Ferrier, stealing across the ground with no more sound than a snake might have made, guided always by the faint glow from the fires, had covered, as he guessed, two-thirds of the distance when he thought it prudent to drop upon hands and knees, lest, upright, his form should be descried by some keen-sighted sentry. He had crawled thus some twenty yards further when suddenly he saw dimly before him a something, like an irregular hedge, no more than four feet high, stretching athwart his path. Was this the boma? Surely it bespoke unusual security in the enemy if they had contented themselves with so low a defence. Their bomas were commonly six feet high or more. He crept on more stealthily until he touched the obstruction: it was a thorny hedge. He tried to peer through it, expecting to see the camp-fires; but he looked into blackness, save for the dull red glow in the sky. Was it possible that the enemy were not so confident after all, but had erected a double barrier? Or was the hedge natural?
He crawled to the left. The hedge had a regular curve. It must have been placed by men. Raising himself gradually to his feet until his eyes were just level with the top, he looked over. Yes; there was the true boma, a dark mass thirty feet away. Through its interstices he saw streaks of dim light from the fires burning within. To set fire to the outer hedge would be useless; within the boma the enemy would be still secure, and the conflagration would but give them light to take aim at their assailants. He must cross the hedge.
But how? By a flying leap? This would expose him to the view of any one on watch, for though the night was dark, it was not so black but that a moving object could be seen. By clambering over? This would be attended by the same risk and by others. He might indeed scramble over at the expense of torn hands and clothing, though there was the danger of being held fast by the tenacious wait-a-bit thorns of which the obstacle was made. But his movements must cause such a crackling and creaking of the interlaced branches as could not fail to alarm any one who chanced to be awake in the camp, no matter at what part of it. Leaping and climbing being equally out of the question, what course remained?
Ferrier was not for nothing the grandson of a man who had roughed it in the backwoods of Canada. If acquired qualities are not inherited, the stock of which he came must have been sturdy and dogged in grain. At any rate, Charles was not the man to be baulked. Dropping on his knees again, he dug his fingers into the soil beneath the hedge. It was gravel, like the ground he had crossed in coming from the river. Very carefully he began to scrape out a hole, intending to persevere until it was large enough for him to squeeze his body through. He soon found that the task was not to be easy. The soil was so light and mobile that, as he scraped, it tended to slip at the sides and fill up the hole he was so laboriously excavating. Further, he felt the hedge, at the point where he was undermining it, subside, with a rustling and creaking which, faint as it was, might easily catch the ear of a wary guard. Fortunately the subsidence was soon checked. The base of the hedge was composed of stout branches which yielded but slightly, and in a few minutes the settling down ceased.
Relieved on this score, Ferrier scraped away at the hole, thinking of John, who was no doubt wondering at the long delay. He worked until his fingers were sore. At last the hole was large enough for him to wriggle under the hedge. He groped with his hands for any thorns that might be sticking out downwards from the tangle above, and finding several, cut them off with his knife. Then, shoving his bundles of grass before him, he crawled into the hole and began to worm his way through. It was a tight fit, and the difficulty was all the greater because of the need for silence. More than once as his body, pressed close against the lower part of the hedge, put some strain upon it, there was a sharp creak when his passage freed the branch. At last he was through, scratched, hot, and breathless, and with a feeling that the various parts of his clothing were in very unnatural relation to one another. But he was through: that was the main thing; and pausing only to take breath, he ran in a stooping posture across the space between the outer and the inner defences.