Buck's speech was cut short by a loud roar from the jingal. The fallen dacoit had trained it perfectly before he dropped, and a comrade now touched off the piece. At the next moment a terrific crash rang through the building. The heavy missile had lighted full on the point where the door was secured by the stout bar, had smashed its way through door and bar and hurled the door open. As the portal flew back, there was a tremendous yell from the edge of the jungle. Then a cloud of blue figures burst into sight. With gleaming dahs flourished on high, or long-barrelled muskets thrown forward ready to fire, the blood-thirsty little men of the mountains rushed upon their prey.
CHAPTER XII.
A FIGHT FOR LIFE.
Jack ran forward to the door and tried to thrust it into place again. It swung to, for its hinges were uninjured, and as he closed it, Me Dain was beside him with a short, thick plank he had brought from the other side of the room. The plank was placed diagonally against the door, its head caught under a cross-bar piece of the framework, and, for the moment, the open gap was filled up. The rifles in the hands of Jim and Buck had been going steadily from the moment the Kachins flew out of their cover, and Jack now poked the muzzle of his weapon through a broken plank, and fired swiftly and steadily into the mass of assailants racing directly towards him. The whole thing happened so quickly that the dacoits had not crossed more than one half of the space intervening between monastery and jungle when Jack opened fire.
The withering storm of bullets poured from the three magazines had no more effect in checking the dacoit rush than if the bullets had been drops of rain. The men actually struck dropped, of course, but their comrades were not in the least terrified by their fall. The short, broad, powerful figures rushed on as undauntedly as ever, their dark, wild faces full of the savage light of battle, their rough, deep voices uniting in a terrible yell of rage and of fierce lust for vengeance. A shower of bullets from their muzzle loaders pattered on the door or whistled in through the windows.
Buck gave a grunt of pain as a bullet cut him across a shoulder; Jim and Jack were untouched. The Kachins did not stay to reload, and in another moment their dark faces and blue forms were massed in the doorway, and the door rang under the tremendous blows delivered upon it by their dahs, weapons so broad and heavy as to be sword and axe in one. The windows, luckily, were too narrow for them to swarm through, and when Jim and Buck could no longer rake the flying crowd, they ran to the door to help their young leader. This was the moment when the Mauser pistol proved itself an invaluable weapon. Quicker and handier in the narrow space than a rifle, it poured its stream of heavy bullets into the assailants in an almost unbroken stream, as the defenders slipped clip after clip, each containing ten cartridges, into the magazine.
Fanatically brave as were the desperate Kachins, this was a punishment too severe for mortal flesh and blood to endure. Of a sudden they broke and fled, leaving a heap of dead and wounded about the door, and a trail of fallen men to mark the track they had followed.
"Are you hurt, Buck?" cried Jack, drawing a long breath. Fiercely as they had been pressed, he had not forgotten Risley's grunt of pain.