Not far from him lay Jerry Wilmot, indulging in thoughts of his own—wondering on what terms were now Bella Chevenix and haughty Lady Julia Wilmot, his cold and heartless mother, who had seen him depart from his father's house to face peril, disease, toil, and, it might be, death, so callously!
Adjacent to Dalton's post was many a horrid souvenir of the hasty retreat made across the Prah by the army of King Koffee, by torchlight, on the night of the 29th of the preceding November, when three hundred men perished. On the skirts of our camp—the foreshore of the Prah—their festering corpses lay in scores, and many that were half skeletons hung curiously and terribly from the branches of trees that arched over the stream. In one place a dead Ashanti sat propped against the stem of a palm-tree, with his head between his hands and his elbows on his knees; around him lay heaps of bones, among which the turkey buzzards waddled. All these men had perished by having failed to achieve a passage by the use of their rope bridge.
Suddenly the sound of musketry close by, ringing out sharply upon the air of the silent night, made the whole picket start to their feet.
'Stand to!' cried Dalton, drawing his sword. 'Unpile!' was the next order, and the picket faced its line of sentries.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.