iron and steel. In his mind he saw a hundred men rise up from ambush,
surround him, and cut him down. He saw himself firing a half-dozen
shots, then drawing his sword and fighting till he fell; but he did fall
in the end, and there was an end of it. It seemed like years while these
visions passed through his mind, but it was no longer than it took to
gather the snaffle-rein close to the sorrel's neck, draw his sword,
clinch it in his left hand with the rein, and gather the pistol snugly in
his right. He listened again. As he touched the sorrel with his knee he
thought he heard a sound ahead.

The sorrel sprang forward, sniffed the air, and threw up his head. His
feet struck the resounding timbers of the bridge, and, as they did so, he
shied; but Cumner's Son, looking down sharply, could see nothing to
either the right or left--no movement anywhere save the dim trees on the
banks waving in the light wind which had risen. A crocodile slipped off
a log into the water--he knew that sound; a rank odour came from the
river bank--he knew the smell of the hippopotamus.

These very things gave him new courage. Since he came from Eton to
Mandakan he had hunted often and well, and once he had helped to quarry
the Little Men of the Jungle when they carried off the wife and daughter
of a soldier of the Dakoon. The smell and the sound of wild life roused
all the hunter in him. He had fear no longer; the primitive emotion of
fighting or self-defence was alive in him.

He had left the bridge behind by twice the horse's length, when, all at
once, the call of the red bittern rang out the third time, louder than
before; then again; and then the cry of a grey wolf came in response.

His peril was upon him. He put spurs to the sorrel. As he did so, dark