saw above the bush, which concealed the winding way,
the dancing head-dresses of the attackers, and advanced his pistol arm.
The rustle of bare feet on the path, a louder roar than ever--then
silence.

Bones waited, a Houssa squeezed on either side of him, but the onrushing
enemy did not appear, and only a faint whimper of sound reached him.

"Lord! they go back!" gasped his sergeant; and Bones saw to his
amazement a little knot of men making their frantic way up the hill.

At first he suspected an ambush within an ambush, but it was unlikely;
he could never be more at Ogibo's mercy than he had been.

Cautiously he felt his way up the hill path, a revolver in each hand.

He rounded a sharp corner of the path and saw....

A great square chasm yawned in the very centre of the pathway, the
bushes on either side were buried under the earth which the diggers of
wells had flung up, and piled one on the other, a writhing, struggling
confusion of shining bodies, were Ogibo's soldiers to the number of a
hundred, with a silent Ogibo undermost, wholly indifferent to his
embarrassing position, for his neck was broken.

Hamilton came up in the afternoon and brought villagers to assist at the
work of rescue and afterwards he interviewed the chief of the shy and
timid Well-folk.

"O chief," said Hamilton, "it is an order of Sandi that you shall dig no
wells near towns, and yet you have done this."

"Bless his old heart!" murmured Bones.

"Lord, I break the law," said the man, simply, "also I break all custom,
for to-day, by your favour, I cross the river, I and my people. This we
have never done since time was."

"Whither do you go?"

The chief of the wanderers, an old man remarkably gifted--for his beard
was long and white, and reached to his waist--stuck his spear head down
in the earth.

"Lord, we go to a place which is written," he said; "for Idoosi has
said, 'Go forth to the natives at war, they that fight by the river; on
the swift water shall you go, even against the water'--many times have
we come to the river, master, but ever have we turned back; but now it
seems that the prophecy has been fulfilled, for there are bleeding men
in these holes and the sound of thunders."

The People of the Well crossed to the Isisi, using the canoes of the
Akasava headmen, and made a slow progress through territory which gave
them no opportunity of exercising their hobby, since water lay less than
a spade's length beneath the