re you doing here, Edala? Go in at
once."

"I'm going to take a hand in this game," she answered, showing her
revolver--her brother had impounded her gun, having none of his own.

"Not if I know it. Clear back in again at once, d'you hear." Then in a
tender undertone, "Be sensible, little girl. Go inside, and keep all
those women from yelling themselves to death with funk directly. You
can do it."

She obeyed, with no further demur.

"`The Lord is King,'" quoted with a sneer, the man just taken to task,
to his neighbour on the other side. "But it seems to me that old
Thornhill's pup is king over Him."

"Meaning yourself?"

"Oh, you're so damn funny, Bridson. You'll bust yourself if you don't
watch it," rejoined the other resentfully.

Hyland, the while, was occupying himself by drawing a cross-nick with a
pocket-knife on the apex of each of his Lee-Metford bullets. The gun
was a rifle and smooth bore, and with a heavy charge of Treble A in the
shot barrel, was calculated, as he put it, to stop the devil himself at
no distance; anyhow many black devils would probably undergo the
experiment before the day was an hour older. He had just finished on
the last bullet when something caused him to throw up his head, rigid
and motionless, listening intently. He had caught the faintest possible
suspicion of that unique sound--the quiver of assegai hafts.

"Pass the word round `Stand by'," he whispered to each of his
neighbours. One ignored it--he recently rated, to wit. Who the devil
was young Thornhill, to come here skippering the whole ship? he wanted
to know--to himself.

Hyland was sighting his piece. In the fast lightening dawn his keen
vision had detected a tongue of dark figures flitting stealthily out of
the mimosa bushes some couple of hundred yards away--and striking out a
line which should bring them round to the back of the entrenchment.
This was the encircling manoeuvre, he decided. And then he let go.

But the detonation, and the wild yell of more than one stricken savage--
for he had fired into them bunched up--was drowned by an appalling roar,
as a dense mass sprang up among the low bushes on that front, and,
waving shield and assegai, charged straight for the earthwork.

"Aim low--aim low," was each man's injunction to his neighbour as the
firearms crashed: in the semi-light making a circle of jetting flame.
With effect too, for the front rows went down like mown corn.

"Ho-ho-ho! Ha