There was a lurid sunset, and the hills were as those of heaven, as described by Dante, 'like sun-illumined gold,' when the party of Sartorius drew near Amoaful, scaring away all Ashantees who approached him, and then when night fell he came upon a wounded Houssa who had fought against us, but gave him the pleasant intelligence that the British troops were at no great distance—at Fomannah—where Sir Garnet halted four days, and messengers came from the King of Ashantee with 1,000 ounces of gold, and the latter received a treaty of peace in return.
The lonely march was resumed in the morning, and at Fomannah Jerry Wilmot and Sartorius, with his twenty men, after having marched, each with arms and forty rounds of ammunition, for fifty-five miles, overtook the retiring troops of Sir Garnet Wolseley.
Jerry now had 'that ugly knock on his sconce,' as he called it, properly dressed and attended to by the medical staff, in whose hands he found poor Dalton done nigh unto death by wounds, and borne among the sick in a hammock, and ere long Jerry was the occupant of another, prostrated by fever, and unconscious of most that followed.
Oblivious of the struggle of the night march to the village of Akanquassie, through a moonless, starless, and pitchy blackness never equalled; through a swamp, over a precipitous hill, and anon through a forest, where every moment one ran against a tree, had the helmet knocked off by a bough, the face scratched by twigs and spiky shrubs, or the foot stumbled over a great gnarled root; yet the voices of the officers and men rang cheerily out as they encouraged each other.
'Close up—close up. Now then, my lads!'
'This way—this way. Look out!'
'For what?'
'A deep pool of water.'
'Mind that root! mind that branch!'
'Hurrah, lads! Forward!'