'More in what?' asked Dalton, testily.
'This confounded gold beetle that you've bagged. Perhaps it is brass.'
'Not at all. Well?'
'It is said to be some great fetish, and you may be followed, tracked to the bitter end—to Cape Coast, for all I know—till it is recaptured, or you, perhaps, made away with. You remember the story of the "Moonstone," published about ten years ago, and how the possessor of it was followed about till it was re-won?'
'Pshaw!—that was in a novel.'
'And this is reality. Novels are supposed to represent real life.'
'There go the bugles; the advance guard is falling in,' said Dalton, as he put the gold scarabœus in his haversack, and they hurried forth.
At six o'clock in the evening the advanced guard moved off, and the main body followed in the dusk, about an hour after. The Black Watch remained as a rear-guard to cover the Engineers and burning party, which consisted of about a hundred men of the latter corps.
Furnished with palm-leaf torches, they began the work of stern and deliberate destruction, and, although grave fears were expressed that the late tempests of rain would prevent the streets of thatch and wood from burning, ere long the retiring troops saw, with cheers, mighty volumes of smoke rolling from end to end of Coomassie, and there was but one regret expressed, that the flames did not consume the Bantama (or burial-place of the kings), with the temples of their hideous and atrocious paganism, made terrible by the gore of a myriad human victims.
The pipers struck up, and merrily the Highlanders began their homeward march, after the officer commanding the Engineers had reported the total destruction of the palace, which he mined at four corners, and brought down like a house of cards.