After a few moments’ rest, the slavers charged in with a wild shout, resolved, at all cost, to wipe out the little band of heroes who held the skull-shaped hill; and when the surging struggling mass of men had been lost in a rain of blows, for full ten minutes, all chance of escape or triumph for our friends seemed gone: but fifty men were left to fight three hundred.
Grenville and Leigh, Amaxosa and Kenyon, were back to back, their blows rained straight and sure, and at every blow from each a man went down, still what could they do against such overwhelming odds as six to one.
Down went the gallant Umbulanzi, with a great spear wound in his back, and down upon his breathless corpse went his recreant foe, his head split to the very chin by a vengeful blow from Grenville’s ready axe.
All was in vain, yet even as our friends had given up all hope of escaping from the hideous crowd which surged in upon them like hungry wolves round a dying buffalo, a clear, cold voice rang out in stentorian tones across the startled veldt, arresting every hand and every arm.
“Cease,” it said; “cease and hold your hands, ye uncircumcised ones, both white and black, unless ye wish to die.” And there upon the knoll, to the utter horror of our friends, flaunted the dreaded banner of Mormonism, and round the mingled mass of combatants, and of dead and dying men, there extended on every hand a mighty triple ring of armed and hated followers of the False Prophet.
Ringed in by fully a thousand well-armed men, further resistance was worse than useless. Moreover, Grenville’s keen eye quickly noted the curious fact that, so far from displaying anything like enthusiasm over the advent of the Mormon host, the slavers seemed considerably more taken aback by the presence of the new arrivals than even his own party.
The tension of feeling between the three bands was all at once unintentionally relieved by poor Leigh suddenly noticing Dora on the crest of the knoll, where the poor girl had been an agonised spectator of the awful fight, and where her cries, notifying the dreaded Mormon approach, had been no more audible than the twitterings of a sparrow. Suddenly noticing her, I say, an expression of positive terror froze poor Leigh’s face, his hair rose up upon his head, and with a fearful shriek of “Dora, Dora, my long-dead, darling wife!” he threw up his hands and fell prone upon his face, with the life-blood welling from his mouth.
Kenyon threw himself upon his knees beside his friend, but in another instant Dora was holding her lover’s head upon her lap, lover and husband both in one, lost and found; and, after all these cruel years of weary waiting, must she find her darling but to lose his love for ever? No! for the good God was full of mercy to the faithful heart that had trusted Him to the very stake of martyrdom, and her husband soon came round again, but to relapse into a dangerous attack of brain fever, from which he escaped only by slow degrees, and it took many weary months and a world of anxious nursing night and day ere Alfred Leigh regained his normal strength.
Speaking again, the Mormon leader, a fine-looking old man, with a snow-white beard, commanded the combatants to lay down their arms and consider themselves the prisoners of the Holy Three, and this order the slavers instantly obeyed.
Stepping coolly forward, however, Grenville spoke up boldly—