Little, however, did our friends know, as yet, of the devilish ingenuity of Master Zero, who had but to suspect the very remotest possibility of the existence of a trap to guard against it in most effectual fashion, and that night our friends received a peculiarly unpleasant proof of his dangerous capabilities in this direction.
The matter fell out thus:—As Kenyon, Leigh, and a party of fifty picked men were lying noiselessly in wait in the cover from which they had that morning driven the enemy, they were suddenly and viciously attacked, without a moment’s warning, by Zero’s forerunner, in the shape of an enormous jaguar, which severely mauled a number of the men ere he was settled by Kenyon, who drove a Zulu assegai through the beast’s spine, whereupon his roarings woke every living echo in the country side, and a moment later a moving mass of dark forms could be seen gliding out from the friendly shadows cast by the mountain, and stringing themselves across the veldt in a vain effort to escape from their active foes.
Quickly Grenville sent up his rocket, and as the glittering thread of fire traced its way across the heavens, Leigh and his eager party dashed down the mountain, and followed the flying foe at speed across the veldt, fearing from their apparent strength that the slavers might prove too heavy for Amaxosa and his little band.
A mile from the rocks, finding their retreat cut off, the slavers formed in square and stood at bay between two fires. Leigh called to them to surrender, and lay down their arms, but the answer was hurled back in the shape of a contemptuous curse and a rattling volley, which stretched several of the Atagbondo upon the ground.
Not one moment after this could Leigh or Amaxosa restrain their men, who simply flung themselves upon the very muzzles of the slavers. Nothing short of a triple line of bayonets could have withstood such a magnificently audacious charge, and in less time than it takes to tell, the “People of the Stick” had literally wiped their hated foes off the face of the earth.
Five minutes covered the whole ghastly affair from beginning to end, and in that short space of time, Zero, in addition to the loss of his pet tiger, had suffered to the extent of fifty-three men, whilst our friends had on their side eleven killed outright and seventeen wounded, two of these last, dying the next day.
“Haow Inkoos,” said the Zulu chief approvingly; “it is indeed a brave people, and fights well, almost as well as the Amazulu, but I would they used the assegai or the axe and made cleaner work of it. Well, what is done is done, my father, and these evil witch-finders will never trouble us again,” and the great Zulu philosophically took a mighty pinch of snuff and offered one to Leigh in token of his entire satisfaction with the result of the night’s work.
As soon as the arms had been collected, and the wounded men properly attended to, a council of war was held by the entire party, and under the circumstances it was considered useless to try and impose deceptive messages upon Zero, the more so as Kenyon himself was strongly of opinion, that not the pigeons, but the jaguar, had in the present instance been intended to carry back to Equatoria, news of the safe arrival of the band. The great cat would, of course, have been started off in the dark, without loss of time, or risk of suspicion even in the event of its being observed, and would certainly have travelled very swiftly to its distant home.
On the following morning the Atagbondo buried their dead, and then threw the deceased slavers into the river to carry a message of woe and weeping to their friends a hundred miles below.
Noticing his cousin looking anxiously at the summit of the mountain several times that day with Kenyon’s field-glass, “What’s the matter with the peak, old chap?” said Leigh.