“Don’t shoot, Baas, it is I.”

“What have you been doing, Hans?” I said as he scrambled over the wall to my side, limping a little as I fancied.

“Baas,” he puffed, “I have been paying the Black Kendah a visit.  I crept down between their stupid outposts, who are as blind in the dark as a bat in daytime, hoping to find Jana and put a bullet into his leg or trunk.  I didn’t find him, Baas, although I heard him.  But one of their captains stood up in front of a watchfire, giving a good shot.  My bullet found him, Baas, for he tumbled back into the fire making the sparks fly this way and that.  Then I ran and, as you see, got here quite safely.”

“Why did you play that fool’s trick?” I asked, “seeing that it ought to have cost you your life?”

“I shall die just when I have to die, not before, Baas,” he replied in the intervals of reloading the little rifle.  “Also it was the trick of a wise man, not of a fool, seeing that it has made the Black Kendah think that we were attacking them and caused them to hurry on to attack us in the dark over ground that they do not know.  Listen to them coming!”

As he spoke a roar of sound told us that the great charge had swept round a turn there was in the pass and was heading towards us up the straight.  Ivory horns brayed, captains shouted orders, the very mountains shook beneath the beating of thousands of feet of men and horses, while in one great yell that echoed from the cliffs and forests went up the battle-cry of “Jana!  Jana!”—­a mixed tumult of noise which contrasted very strangely with the utter silence in our ranks.

“They will be among the pitfalls presently,” sniggered Hans, shifting his weight nervously from one leg on to the other.  “Hark! they are going into them.”

It was true.  Screams of fear and pain told me that the front ranks had begun to fall, horse and foot together, into the cunningly devised snares of which with so much labour we had dug many, concealing them with earth spread over thin wickerwork, or rather interlaced boughs.  Into them went the forerunners, to be pierced by the sharp, fire-hardened stakes set at the bottom of each pit.  Vainly did those who were near enough to understand their danger call to the ranks behind to stop.  They could not or would not comprehend, and had no room to extend their front.  Forward surged the human torrent, thrusting all in front of it to death by wounds or suffocation in those deadly holes, till one by one they were filled level with the ground by struggling men and horses, over whom the army still rushed on.

How many perished there I do not know, but after the battle was over we found scarcely a pit that was not crowded to the brim with dead.  Truly this device of Ragnall’s, for if I had conceived the idea, which was unfamiliar to the Kendah, it was he who had carried it out in so masterly a fashion, had served us well.

Still the enemy surged on, since the pits were only large enough to hold a tithe of them, till at length, horsemen and footmen mixed up together in inextricable confusion, their mighty mass became faintly visible quite close to us, a blacker blot upon the gloom.