With mutual exclamations of joy, we were proceeding to clamber over the fallen piles of rotten palisades and clay, when a wretched negro, who appeared suddenly, on perceiving the whiteness of our skins in the bright moonlight, uttered a loud cry of wonder or alarm!
In an instant we heard the clatter of steel, and at least a dozen of the King's armed women issued from a kind of wooden tower which stood near the fallen wall.
Hartly uttered something very like an oath; he struck the negro to the earth by a blow of his club, and crying--"Follow me, Jack!" sprang over the scattered ruin, and rushed into the moonlit country beyond.
Swift of foot and active as these "fair viragoes" were, they proved no match for us in a race for life or death, especially when encumbered ty their muskets, asseguys, and red petticoats, which were covered with heavy beads, lions' teeth, and grass braiding.
Two shots were fired after us, but where the balls went, Heaven only knows; fortunately, they fell far from us.
On we ran in the full blaze of the moonlight, bathed in perspiration, now floundering among wild gourds and creeping plants, where little snakes started up to hiss at us; anon over waste tracts, where lilies and geraniums covered all the wilderness; then among long and serrated grass, which cut our shins like saws and sabre-blades. Next we tore a passage through dense masses of wild canes, then through fields of maize, or rice, or millet, and often through cattle kraals, till we reached a wood, where, after taking the precaution of running in _one_ direction in the full light of the moon, we turned and, hare-like, doubled in the _other_.
By this manoeuvre, I believe, we baffled our _fair_ pursuers, as we saw no more of them for the remainder of that night or the following morning, during the long hours of which we lay close to the earth, buried and hidden under a cool and shady mass of leaves and jungle.
And there, without water to quench our thirst, and without other food than a few wild berries that grew within arm's length of our lurking place, we lay concealed during the whole of the next day.
When night fell, Hartly climbed into a chestnut-tree, and after looking carefully around him, uttered an exclamation of delight.