it seemed as if, faintly spoken as it was, the big sailor's
warning had reached the sensitive nerves of both the wounded, making
them stir uneasily and mutter something unintelligible, while the light
of morning, which had before been so sluggish in its approach, seemed
now to be coming on by a steady glide, as if the black darkness which
had pressed so heavily upon the spirits of two of the party was now
being swept away like a cloud.

A terrible dread came over Murray, for he saw in the moving figures
death coming upon him in most probably some horribly brutal form, and he
could feel his nerves thrill with an icy sensation which had its origin
among the roots of his hair and then began to glide down his spine till
it reached to and made its exit from his toes; while in spite of what he
suffered, he could not help recalling some of the words which had passed
between him and his waking companion as he was conscious of fresh
movements on the part of Roberts and Titely, and he wished that he could
carry out what had been proposed, namely, to sit upon the pair and keep
them quiet.

"They'll let the wretches know where we are," he thought, and quietly
reaching out one leg till he could reach Tom May's big body, he gave him
a steady thrust.

"That will keep him on the _qui vive_," he thought to himself; and then
the lad started violently, for the big sailor responded with a
well-meant but decidedly forcible kick, which Murray took for a warning
of impending danger, and raised his head to look, but dropped it again
on the instant, throbbing with excitement, for there were the moving
figures, clearly seen now, in the shape of a villainous-looking party of
about a dozen well-armed men, clothed sailor fashion and graduated in
colour from the sun-tanned skin of a white through the swarthiness of
the Malay and Mulatto to the black of the East Indian and the intense
ebony of the African black.

He gazed in that moment, as he knew for certain, upon a party of the
cut-throat ruffians belonging to the crew of one of the slave-trade
vessels, and as he subsided, it was with the feeling upon him that his
head must have been seen, that in another instant he should be listening
to the rush of feet, and would have to make a desperate effort to
preserve his life, while all the while he was lying there suffering from
a kind of paralysis which held him as if he were passing through the
worst phases of a nightmare-like dream.

"Poor old