Sure enough, they were coming.  The crouching warriors were quivering with excitement, as their gleaming eyes sought the mouth of the defile, out of which came a confused murmur.  From a murmur to a hoarse rumble, then swiftly to the sound of fierce cries, the noise grew, and then a man leapt into view, and after him a score, all running as if for life.  The plan was working, but was it not working too thoroughly?  Would those men in whom was the panic of flight be able to stand?  Muata came last, the long feathers streaming from his head; and as he ran, he shouted at his flying men words of insult.  He cleared the defile, and at his heels there grew a fierce and growing clamour.  Then, like a pack of wolves on the heels of a deer, the wild men of the woods burst into view.  Close together they ran, and when they saw the valley stretching green and peaceful before them, they halted to drink in the sight.  They feasted their eyes on the gardens, on the little flocks of goats, on the huts, on the women and children streaming up the slope on the right.  Then they shouted in their joy of the promise of blood, of loot, of feasting—­ shouted and bounded forward.  As they were in their stride once more, a wild yell rang out of the defile—­a yell of fear and warning, that reached them, and that brought them up with a jerk.  They faced round impatiently towards the defile again, and, behold, the mouth was held by a party of the enemy!  But only a small party, less than half their number.  With a yell they charged, and then they halted, and then they broke, and in a twinkling they had lost their cunning and were themselves the fugitives; for at the first step two of their leading men had fallen, and into the thick of them, from a distance of a hundred yards, came an accurate and unexpected rifle-fire.  A trap!  They shouted to each other, then broke streaming across the river in a frantic search for hiding.  In vain they fled, for the valley seemed alive with men, Muata’s band having scattered purposely; while keen-eyed boys, standing in tree-tops, marked down the fugitives, and shouted directions to the hunters.  Even the women, led by the chief’s mother, came down to join in the pursuit.

This work was not to the taste of the two white boys.  They had played their part, and now they entered the defile to seek their companion.

Compton went ahead into the shadows, following the river, and thinking of nothing but the fight that they knew from the sounds was raging somewhere before them.  As he turned a corner made by a projection in the wall, a dark hand seized him by the neck, and he was on his back, with a roaring sound in his ears, and a feeling of suffocation.

“What’s the matter?” he gasped presently, when the grip on his throat relaxed.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes, of course.”  Compton got up.  “You look queer.”

“Feel queer,” said Venning.  “Enough to make a chap queer to see you go down like that with a big black on top of you.”