e upon what awaited them on the following day.

Haviland had fallen asleep through sheer exhaustion, but his slumbers
were fitful, and ever haunted by frightful visions, which would start
him wide awake and quaking: for his nerves were unstrung with the awful
ordeal he had undergone; and further, the recollection of the sickening
massacre, the heat and excitement of battle over, was one to haunt. In
his broken, unrestful sleep he was back at Saint Kirwin's, and, instead
of the Headmaster, it was Mushad, duly arrayed in academicals--which did
not seem a bit strange or out of the way in the _bizarre_ reality of his
dream--who was about to pass sentence upon him. And then appeared
Cetchy, not as he used to be, but as a big, powerful, full-grown man,
and started to punch the spurious Doctor's head, and they fought long
and hard, and he watched them in powerless and agonising apprehension,
for upon the issue of the contest depended whether he should undergo the
hideous fate in store for him or not. And then he awoke.

To the first sense of relief succeeded a quick realisation that the
actuality of their position was worse than the make-believe of any
dream. Involuntarily a groan escaped him. The savage face of one of
his guards shot up noiselessly, with a sleepily malignant grin. But
Haviland realised that it was growing almost imperceptibly lighter. The
day would soon be here.

It was the hour before dawn, and sleep lay heavy upon the slave-hunters'
camp. Even their sentinels scarcely took the trouble to keep awake.
Why should they? Did they not belong to the great Mushad, whose name
was a terror to half a continent, whose deeds a sweeping scourge? Who
would dare to assail or molest such a power as this? So, in the faint
lightening of the darkness which preceded the first dawn of day, they
slumbered on, heavily, peacefully, unsuspectingly. And then came the
awakening. The awakening of death.

The vibrant barking slogan seems to shatter the world, as the
destroyers, apparently starting up from nowhere, pour over the silent
camp, and each affrighted sleeper leaps up, only to meet the slash of
the broad shearing blade which rends his vitals, and hurls him back to
the earth, a deluging corpse. Huge figures, fell and dark, hundreds and
hundreds of them, and yet more and more, with streaming adornments and
mighty shields and short-handled, broad-bladed spears--this is what the
captives behold in that terrible hou