A worse obstruction still was encountered at Ordah, where the water had risen two feet above the bridge built by the Engineers, and was more than five feet deep in the mid-channel, and there the shorter men had all to be assisted by their comrades who could swim. Another day crept on, and by five o'clock in the afternoon the whole of the white troops had succeeded in crossing the half-hidden bridge; but darkness was coming on, the river was rising fast, and for all they knew the Ashantees, infuriated by the destruction of Coomassie, might be pouring in wild hordes upon their rear!
Dalton's wounds had been dressed, but ere that was done he had lost so much blood that his chances of recovery seemed very precarious; and meanwhile how fared Jerry Wilmot?
When he struggled back to consciousness, and half raised himself out of the place in which he lay by grasping the branch of a bush, he found himself alone, and surrounded by dead silence. Not a sound fell on his ear, and at a little distance he could see the red smouldering flames of Coomassie. But where were the troops?
'Oh, God, help me!' he wailed out. 'Gone—gone, and I am left alone and helpless behind them!'
There was a gleam of moonlight now, and after several futile efforts, for his senses reeled like those of one intoxicated, he made out the hour on his watch.
'Midnight—and they have been six hours on the march!'
He had been in a state of semi-unconsciousness for some two hours. The sense—the conviction that he must instantly do something—attempt to overtake them, made him struggle up desperately, feebly, and half blinded in his own blood.
'Oh, Lord,' thought Jerry, 'I shall lose the little reason I have left! Why did Dalton covet that infernal beetle!'
Alone—alone at Coomassie. Was not this some horrible nightmare, and not a reality, crushing and bewildering? for but two fates seemed to await him. If he did not die of hunger in the wilderness, he would be sure to be tracked and taken; and then, if not killed at once, he would be doomed to a lingering death by torture in Coomassie, or what remained of it—tortures such as devils alone could devise.
He made an attempt to stand, but all power of volition seemed to have left him; he fell again into the leafy hollow, and for a time remembered no more.