ered."

"That's quite true," said Peters.

"Well, Peters and I, and as many of you as will volunteer, are going to
start off down the road now at once to the rescue of Fullerton's
outfit--if no one'll join, the two of us will go alone. You see we've
just seen white women and children who'd been cut up into pieces.
Fullerton has women with him. Who'll volunteer?"

Several men stepped forward without hesitation. Others would have, but
one had no horse, another no rifle, and so forth. All these objections
were met by Lamont without a moment's hesitation.

"Get them then," he said, "and that at once. I'll be responsible for
those who are too out of luck to get them for themselves. Get them, and
roll up here as soon as ever you can. Not a minute to lose."

To describe the state of excitement that prevailed is rather beyond our
strength. Most of the men were wiry, hard-bitten prospectors, some of
them, as the speaker had put it, `out of luck,' a euphemism for out of
funds, others were doing a spell of taking it easy, but all were
enthusiastic to join. But all stared at Lamont with wonder. He whom
they had never known other than the soul of coolness, and reticence, and
caution, was now on fire. His eyes seemed to blaze from his colourless
face, his voice trembled with its earnestness as he drove home his
appeal to them by drawing a picture of these two helpless women, refined
and daintily raised, at the mercy of--in the power of--these black
fiends; of whose `mercy' in such cases, he and those with him had, with
their own eyes, just beheld a sample.

"I say, Lamont," began Orwell, most of the men having gone away to
effect their preparations, "don't you think you're rather
over-estimating the risk. You know you're tired and excited, and all
that."

"No, I don't. I know what I'm about, and I know what I've seen. I tell
you, Orwell, if you'd listened to me a fortnight ago instead of loftily
pooh-poohing everything I told you, it might have made a lot of
difference."

"What's all this scare-mongering about," began another man who had just
entered. "Here they are telling me, Lamont, that you're organising an
expedition to go to the relief of the Fullertons. Why, man, they've got
a dozen of our police with them."

The speaker was Isard's subaltern. Isard himself was out on a patrol
just then.

"All serene, Blackmore. If they had a hundred of your police they might
not have one too many. At any rate I