“Now, friends—all of you,” shouted Henry, the moment he was relieved of his charge, “little Alice is in that house—we must pull it down! who will lend a hand?”
He did not pause for an answer, but seizing an axe, rushed through the smoke and began to cut down the door-posts. The whole party there assembled, numbering about fifty, rushed forward, as one man, to aid in the effort. The attempt was a wild one. Had Henry considered for a moment, he would have seen that, in the event of their succeeding in pulling down the blazing pile, they should in all probability smother the child in the ruins.
“The shell is in the out-house,” said Corrie, eagerly, to the giant who held him.
“Wot shell?” inquired Bumpus.
“The shell that they blow like a horn to call the people to work with.”
“Ah! you’re sane again,” said the sailor, releasing him; “go, find it, lad, and blow till yer cheeks crack.”
Corrie was gone long before Jo had concluded even that short remark. In another second the harsh but loud sound of the shell rang over the hill-side. The settlers, black and white, immediately ceased their pursuit of the savages, and from every side they came trooping in by dozens. Without waiting to inquire the cause of what was being done, each man, as he arrived, fell to work on the blazing edifice, and, urged on by Henry’s voice and example, toiled and moiled in the midst of fire and smoke, until the pastor’s house was literally pulled to pieces.
Fortunately for little Alice, she had been carried out of that house long before by Keona, who, being subtle as well as revengeful, knew well how to strike at the tenderest part of the white man’s heart.
While her friends were thus frantically endeavouring to deliver her from the burning house in which they supposed her to be, Alice was being hurried through the woods by a steep mountain path in the direction of the native village. Happily for the feelings of her father, the fact was made known, soon after the house had been pulled down, by the arrival of a small party of native settlers bearing one of the child’s shoes. They had found it, they said, sticking in the mud, about a mile off, and had tracked the little footsteps a long way into the mountains by the side of the prints made by the naked feet of a savage. At length they had lost the tracks amid the hard lava rocks and had given up the chase.
“We must follow them up instantly,” said Mr Mason, who had by this time recovered; “no time is to be lost.”