For fully three days did our friends occupy themselves in the very
necessary work of perfecting the defences of their stronghold on the
mountain, and in teaching a picked dozen of the Atagbondo the use of the
rifle, with which weapon they soon became fair marksmen, in the native
acceptance of the term.
On the fourth day, however, a discovery, trifling in itself, convinced
the party that, so far from having been forgotten by Zero, they were at
present occupying the whole of his earnest attention.
The incident in question was the accidental notice taken by Kenyon of a
small bird wheeling round and round their position; closer and closer it
came, until all could see perfectly well that it was a white carrier
pigeon, bearing a message. Finding, however, that the party did not
whistle it in, the bird grew shy, and quickly took to flight Leigh
raised his rifle with the intention of bringing it down, but Kenyon
stopped him just in time.
"Don't shoot, old fellow," he said; "I've a fancy to let that bird
severely alone. I want to know just where it's bound for at the present
moment."
Watching very carefully, the pigeon was at last seen to enter a clump of
bush about half a mile up the mountain side, and scarcely ten minutes
later, either it, or a similar bird, left the same cover, and winged its
rapid way due north.
The inference was plain, and our friends looked blankly at one another;
but, ere they could speak, the Zulu chief had summoned Umbulanzi and
directed him to take two men, thoroughly search the suspected spot, and
put to the assegai anyone they might find lurking there.
Grenville and Kenyon would have much preferred taking the spy--if spy
there was--alive, but the fear that his presence would cause the injured
People of the Stick to overstep all restraint and become guilty of some
fearful act of barbaric cruelty, decided them to let the man fight it
out to the bitter end for his own life, rather than to permit him to
fall into the hands of a raging mob of naked savages, whose tenderest
mercies, maddened as they were by their frightful wrongs, would be cruel
indeed.
Anxiously our friends watched the progress of the three Zulus up the
mountain, and all at once Leigh took a fancy to follow them, and was
soon swinging up the slant with rapid steps, accompanied by Amaxosa and
Kenyon.
The Zulus reached the spot and plunged into the cover, from which there
instantly arose a tremendous hubbub, and a moment later all three
reappeared, fairly driven out by half a score of white men, and fighting
furiously with their spears against several of the slavers, who were
armed with axes, whilst the remainder stood by eagerly seeking an
opportunity to use their guns.
Promptly Leigh and Kenyon pitched forward their rifles, and two of the
slavers instantly rolled head over heels down the mountain side, whilst
at the same moment, uttering a wild shout of encouragement, Amaxosa
dashed forward like an arrow from the bow, and in another second was
side by side with his warriors, their nervous arms dealing out death and
disaster with every sweeping blow. When Leigh and Kenyon reached the
platform upon which this tragedy had been enacted, there was but one of
the enemy left alive, and he was engaged in a terrific hand-to-hand
combat with Amaxosa. All at once the Zulu's axe broke off short in the
haft, and the ruffian slaver rushed at him with a victorious shout.
Springing lightly to one side, however, the active chief easily avoided
the deadly stroke aimed at him by his opponent, whom he seized the next
instant from behind, with his powerful hands pinning the man's arms to
his side, and before anyone could interfere, or even speak, with one
mighty effort the fierce Zulu fairly swung his hapless foe from the
ground, and then dashed him down full upon the rock, on his bare skull,
which was crushed in like an egg-shell, the awful blow, of course,
killing him on the spot, and an instant later the mountain side echoed
to the triumphant notes of the famous Undi war-chant.
"Oh, my father," said the great Zulu, contemplating his handiwork with
satisfaction, and speaking to Leigh, "it was a great fight; few could
have slain the man with empty hands. Sleep softly, ye evildoers; the
Lion of the Undi bids you sleep!"
Carefully examining the cover from which the discomfited foe had sprung,
our friends found that it consisted of a shallow cave in the face of the
rock, the entrance being masked by low bushes, and a thick undergrowth
of wild vines. In this hiding-place Kenyon discovered a basket
containing three white and two black pigeons, whilst a note, evidently
the one just received, lay upon the rocky floor. Eagerly pouncing upon
this, the detective quickly mastered its contents, which were simply as
follows:--
"The second detachment will arrive at midnight to-night.--
"Zero."
Clearly it was not, therefore, a mere question of spying upon their
position; but the evident intention of the cunning slaver was to send in
small drafts of men to conceal themselves upon the mountain; and these,
when his own army moved up to the attack, would, at a given signal,
doubtless fall upon our friends in the rear, and thus effect a very
serious diversion in favour of Zero, at a most critical moment.
The scheme was well thought-out, but the watchfulness of Kenyon had
completely ruined it; and if the further suggestions which he now made
should prove workable, the little band might be relied upon to read
Master Zero another very severe and humiliating lesson, when he made his
intended final onset.
Briefly, Kenyon's idea consisted of an attempt to lure the second
detachment of slavers on to their utter destruction, but in view of
their prematurely taking the alarm in consequence of our friends
possibly failing to understand and correctly to answer their secret
signals, a large party was to be slipped into the long grass of the
veldt to intercept the slavers in the event of their making a push to
escape, and an endeavour was to be made to capture some of the men
alive, and force them to give up the secrets of their curious system of
aerial correspondence.
Finally it was decided that Amaxosa should set out with ten of his own
men and fifty of the warriors of the Atagbondo at moonrise, and lie in
ambush about three miles to the north of the mountain, but this party
was on no account to make any movement, except in the event of a rocket
being fired from the camp, giving them the direction of the escaping
slavers. The Zulu was especially cautioned against making fire signals
of any kind, as it was calculated that the enemy would, themselves,
probably employ these.
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.
"I wish I knew, Alf," was the reply; "I haven't seen it since the night
we got here: ever since then it has been completely hidden by yonder
white cloud, which rests upon it, and unless I am mistaken, the heat
emanating from that vapour is so intense, that the everlasting snows are
being absolutely melted away from the summit of the cone."
Just then a very wonderful and awful thing happened, for even as
Grenville was speaking, the heat-clouds suddenly rolled away like a
scroll and curled up out of sight, revealing the glittering peak for one
brief instant in all the radiant majesty of its unveiled glory, and then
the very next second there shot far, far up into the azure vault, a
giant jet of angry, inky-looking smoke, which floated lightly and lazily
through the absolutely pulseless air towards the north, and was quickly
succeeded by another great puff, and another, until the whole of the
northern heavens were densely clouded, and the mountain itself bore the
appearance of a gigantic monster mechanically expelling vast volumes of
dead black smoke at every labouring respiration of its mighty rock-girt
lungs, and shrouding the whole country in a sombre death-like pall of
weird and awful shade.
"A volcano, by Jove!" ejaculated Leigh.
"Yes," replied his cousin, "and an active one, too. I fear that
Umbulanzi's explosion, the first night we came, has awakened the
slumbering internal fires, or else the water is somehow penetrating into
the crater and interfering with the gases imprisoned in its abysmal
depths. We shall be in a nice pickle if the volcano takes a fancy to
indulge in an eruption just at present; however, we must hope for the
best, old man, and put our trust in Providence."
That very night, sad to say, our friends were awakened by the
objectionable throes of a mighty earthquake; the rocks quaked and
groaned, and the very bowels of the mountain were rent and torn by
ear-splitting explosions, and in less than ten minutes the whole party
was in full flight across the northern veldt, positively chased from the
stronghold upon which they had bestowed so much labour by great streams
of burning lava which, like vast rivers, flowed unimpeded down the
mountain side, and, instantly setting the long grass on fire, caused our
friends a most anxious time until they had safely crossed the river and
got well away from the spot--their movements being rendered relatively
slow by the necessity of carefully transporting the wounded men in
hammocks.
After a short consultation it was decided to steer for the Hermit's Cave
again, and to try and discover a place capable of defence somewhere in
the immediate vicinity of Equatoria; for, with the exception of the
mountain from which they had just been so rudely expelled, our friends
were assured by the natives that no natural fastness of any kind existed
within a hundred miles to the south of their present location, and
southwards all, both black and white, absolutely declined to move until
Zero was stamped out, or until they themselves were effectually disposed
of in attempting to settle with him.
A very sharp look-out would have to be kept in order to avoid falling
into the hands of the slavers, who were sure to notice the eruption of
the volcano, and, knowing that the little band would have in consequence
to relinquish the shelter afforded by the mountain, would doubtless be
outlying with a view to falling upon them unawares; but by confining the
travels of the party strictly to the night-time, and lying carefully hid
by day, Grenville and Amaxosa hoped to bring all safely into the desired
haven.
At all events, our friends were no worse off, in consequence of their
journey to the peak, having, on the contrary, inflicted two crushing
blows upon the enemy, and exchanged the bare handful of men with which
they left Equatoria for a small army thoroughly equipped for war,
already well-tried, and thirsting for occupation in the fighting line.