I had made my last round of the little corps that I facetiously named “The Sharpshooters,” though to tell the truth at shooting they were anything but sharp, and seen that each man was in his place behind a wall with a reserve man squatted at the rear of every pair of them, waiting to take his rifle if either of these should fall.  Also I had made sure that all of them had twenty rounds of ammunition in their skin pouches.  More I would not serve out, fearing lest in excitement or in panic they might fire away to the last cartridge uselessly, as before now even disciplined white troops have been known to do.  Therefore I had arranged that certain old men of standing who could be trusted should wait in a place of comparative safety behind the line, carrying all our reserve ammunition, which amounted, allowing for what had been expended in practice, to nearly sixty rounds per rifle.  This they were instructed to deliver from their wallets to the firing line in small lots when they saw that it was necessary and not before.

It was, I admit, an arrangement apt to miscarry in the heat of desperate battle, but I could think of none better, since it was absolutely necessary that no shot should be wasted.

After a few words of exhortation and caution to the natives who acted as sergeants to the corps, I returned to a bough shelter that had been built for us behind a rock to get a few hours’ sleep, if that were possible, before the fight began.

Here I found Ragnall, who had just come in from his inspection.  This was of a much more extensive nature than my own, since it involved going round some furlongs of the rough walls and trenches that he had prepared with so much thought and care, and seeing that the various companies of the White Kendah were ready to play their part in the defence of them.

He was tired and rather excited, too much so to sleep at once.  So we talked a little while, first about the prospects of the morrow’s battle, as to which we were, to say the least of it, dubious, and afterwards of other things.  I asked him if during his stay in this place, while I was below at the town or later, he had heard or seen anything of his wife.

“Nothing,” he answered.  “These priests never speak of her, and if they did Harut is the only one of them that I can really understand.  Moreover, I have kept my word strictly and, even when I had occasion to see to the blocking of the western road, made a circuit on the mountain-top in order to avoid the neighbourhood of that house where I suppose she lives Oh!  Quatermain, my friend, my case is a hard one, as you would think if the woman you loved with your whole heart were shut up within a few hundred yards of you and no communication with her possible after all this time of separation and agony.  What makes it worse is, as I gathered from what Harut said the other day, that she is still out of her mind.”

“That has some consolations,” I replied, “since the mindless do not suffer.  But if such is the case, how do you account for what you and poor Savage saw that night in the Town of the Child?  It was not altogether a phantasy, for the dress you described was the same we saw her wearing at the Feast of the First-fruits.”