Just then a hammock was borne in, and from this there alighted a white woman, a Spaniard or an Italian by her looks; this female being instantly accommodated with a seat, and approached with much deference by the white men in the crowd.
Leigh thought he had never seen a more wicked, yet withal a more handsome, face. Her complexion was beautifully clear, her hair black and glossy as the raven’s wing, and her figure simply superb; but the eyes looked like coals of living fire, and the mouth, as Kenyon—who was busy sketching her in his notebook—remarked, was more like a spring rat-trap than anything else.
A wait of half an hour next ensued, during which the native band discoursed sweet (?) music, and then there went up a mighty shout from the motley throng which thickly lined the farther side of the great enclosure, as a small crowd of men, white and black, were driven in at the spear’s point; all had their hands tied behind them, but had their legs left perfectly free to enable them to run at will, the slavers knowing well, that deprived as the captives were of the use of their hands and arms, they could not escape by climbing up the rocks.
A moment later the friends, to their utter horror, beheld a barrier lifted, and through the opening thus made there immediately charged a colossal-looking bull-elephant. For a full minute the great brute gazed wickedly about him, as if debating the possibility of getting at the block fellows who were rapidly angering him with their infernal tom-toms; next he trumpeted until the welkin rang again, and then all of a sudden threw up his trunk, and hurled his vast bulk blindly at the wretched band of captives, who fled incontinently in every direction, whilst the air resounded with yells of laughter from the spectators, black and white, across the wide enclosure. These wretches were evidently enjoying to the full this intensely Roman spectacle, and Leigh felt his blood boil at the thought that the lives of human beings—white men, moreover—were to be deliberately sacrificed in this truly diabolical manner to provide an hour’s amusement for an ignorant savage and his greasy, yelping retinue of semi-monkeyfied followers. By and by, however, a great black man fleeted—with the speed of light—past the rock where our friends lay hid, the enraged elephant following close upon his heels; and brief though the glimpse was, in an instant Leigh knew his man, and blew a peculiar little reed whistle which Kenyon had often noticed attached to his friend’s watch-chain.
Once! twice! thrice! he sounded the signal, and then, lo! and behold, every captive on the ground, both white and black, was seen to turn short in his tracks and speed madly across the wide stretch of open, in a wild endeavour to reach the distant rock; close behind the crowd thundered the giant mammal, screaming with rage, and gaining upon the luckless wights at every step, the tip of his snake-like trunk almost seeming to touch the hindmost runner. It was an altogether extraordinary, yet at the same time a very dreadful, sight; and as Leigh’s rifle leaped to his shoulder, he seemed, by one of those curious tricks which fancy sometimes plays us, to see the Colosseum spread out before him, its benches packed to suffocation with the pleasure-seekers of an ancient Roman holiday, and its arena peopled by the noble martyrs falling beneath the claws of Nero’s ravening beasts.
History ever repeats itself, and at this very instant, whilst the easy-going people of the nineteenth Christian century were sitting quietly in their peaceful homes, thanking God that such acts and deeds were for ever at an end, here was the horrid self-same spectacle being re-enacted in darkest Africa, without any of the added refinements of modern cruelty, upon the living bodies of their own fellow-men, both white and black.
Thought, however, is swift, and Leigh’s thought delayed him never an instant, and even as he pressed the trigger and saw the deadly bullet go homo, and the mighty elephant pitch forward upon his knees, he sprang upright upon the ledge of rock, to show the captives where their friends lay hid; then, as his rifle thundered out again, backed up by the echo of Kenyon’s heavy piece, and the discomfited elephant wallowed on the ground with three shell bullets in his ugly carcass, Leigh was conscious that Kenyon was slipping down the rock, and quickly following his friend, both were in an instant busy with their hunting-knives upon the thongs which held the prisoners, who, twenty-five in number, six white and the rest black, were all at liberty and eagerly scrambling up the rock before the mixed assemblage beyond the great enclosure had thoroughly realised what was going on, less than a thousand yards away, under cover of the smoke and the rapid discharges of strange rifles.
Just as a crowd of white men came streaming across the ground, and as Leigh was about to raise his rifle with the view of checking their advance, a voice behind him said, “Give me a turn at that, Alf; I long to get even with yonder blasphemous slaving hound. He tarred and feathered me one day.”
Leigh knew the voice, and turning quickly, confronted his long-lost Cousin Dick. One warm hand-grasp was all, then the tears started to his eyes, as he relinquished his gun and strode away.
Dick Grenville! But alas! how changed—feeble, emaciated, and hollow-eyed, covered with filth, and clad in the skin of a leopard. Leigh had actually taken his own cousin for a very ordinary-looking black man, but the old spirit, unbroken by Mormons or slavers, was still there—the eye as true, and the hand firm as a grip of steel. Springing forward, he shook the weapon over his head, and his voice went ringing across the rock-bound stretch of veldt, as he called to the leader of the advancing crowd, “Crewdson Walworth, I promised you this a year ago, and here it is—a Grenville ever keeps his word.” The rifle vomited its deadly contents, and the man, who was none other than Kenyon’s quondam acquaintance, the “Swell” of Durban, went down, with a bullet through his heart, and pitched head over heels like a shot rabbit.