“I dare say, lad.  It was pretty hot down there at one time.”

“Oh, you know this is not fair to us!  I say, Dick, come here.”

“What is it?” asked Compton, coming in from attending the fire.

“Mr. Hume has got himself wounded, and he never told us.”

“Don’t bother about me, lads; I’ll be all right in the morning.”

But they did bother about him—­washed the blood from his face, cleansed and treated a jagged wound on the skull and fomented a swelling on the right wrist, and then insisted on his taking food.

“Now, you go to sleep,” said Venning; “and in the morning, perhaps, you’ll tell us all about it.”

They were very silent, until the Hunter fell into a deep sleep, when they tiptoed out to the fire, and sat long into the night listening to the noisy shouts of rejoicing that floated up from the village below, where the fires gleamed brightly, too anxious themselves to even discuss Mr. Hume’s injuries.  In the morning, however, when they opened their drowsy eyes, they were gladdened by the sight of the Hunter returning from the bath, with the drops still glistening on his tawny beard.

“Now tell us,” they said, when the breakfast was prepared, “all about the fight.”

“It is soon told.  I let the enemy pass in pursuit of Muata, as arranged, but when it came to our part in the plan—­that of closing the defile—­we found the job tougher than we anticipated.  Those cannibals are hard fighters.  They fell back as we unmasked our ambush; but they rallied quickly, and delivered one assault upon another.  I tell you, we were at our last gasp when your arrival decided the matter.”

“You must have come to close quarters?”

Mr. Hume nodded his head.  “I received the blow on the wrist guarding my head from a club, and the cut on the head from a spear.”

“And you used your knife?”

“I dare say I did my share,” said the Hunter, who had held the defile alone at one time, his staunchest supporter, the Angoni Zulu, having fallen back exhausted.

For a trying spell his undaunted spirit had stood between the valley and destruction, and the wild men went back to Hassan with a tale of a terrible white man who had struck down their bravest with a great blade.

“That Ghoorka knife,” he said, “is a great weapon;” and with that summing-up of the struggle in the gloom of the defile he lit his pipe, and sat down to gaze upon the valley, so peaceful in appearance, so charged with the everlasting tragedy of life.  “If those people were whites, or Arabs, they would now be following up the enemy to crush him while he is disorganized.  But being blacks, they don’t look further ahead than their noses, which were made short for the purpose.”

“Let us go down and offer to lead an expedition in pursuit,” said Compton.

“I guess not, Dick.  They’d leave us to do all the fighting ourselves; and there’s no sense in that.  What we have to think about is how to get away.”