fire, the blood-thirsty little men of the mountains rushed upon their
prey.

CHAPTER XII.

A FIGHT FOR LIFE.

Jack ran forward to the door and tried to thrust it into place again.
It swung to, for its hinges were uninjured, and as he closed it, Me
Dain was beside him with a short, thick plank he had brought from the
other side of the room. The plank was placed diagonally against the
door, its head caught under a cross-bar piece of the framework, and,
for the moment, the open gap was filled up. The rifles in the hands of
Jim and Buck had been going steadily from the moment the Kachins flew
out of their cover, and Jack now poked the muzzle of his weapon
through a broken plank, and fired swiftly and steadily into the mass
of assailants racing directly towards him. The whole thing happened so
quickly that the dacoits had not crossed more than one half of the
space intervening between monastery and jungle when Jack opened fire.

The withering storm of bullets poured from the three magazines had no
more effect in checking the dacoit rush than if the bullets had been
drops of rain. The men actually struck dropped, of course, but their
comrades were not in the least terrified by their fall. The short,
broad, powerful figures rushed on as undauntedly as ever, their dark,
wild faces full of the savage light of battle, their rough, deep
voices uniting in a terrible yell of rage and of fierce lust for
vengeance. A shower of bullets from their muzzle loaders pattered on
the door or whistled in through the windows.

Buck gave a grunt of pain as a bullet cut him across a shoulder; Jim
and Jack were untouched. The Kachins did not stay to reload, and in
another moment their dark faces and blue forms were massed in the
doorway, and the door rang under the tremendous blows delivered upon
it by their _dahs_, weapons so broad and heavy as to be sword and axe
in one. The windows, luckily, were too narrow for them to swarm
through, and when Jim and Buck could no longer rake the flying crowd,
they ran to the door to help their young leader. This was the moment
when the Mauser pistol proved itself an invaluable weapon. Quicker and
handier in the narrow space than a rifle, it poured its stream of
heavy bullets into the assailants in an almost unbroken stream, as the
defenders slipped clip after clip, each containing ten cartridges,
into the magazine.

Fanatically brave as were the desperate Kachins, this was a punishment
too se