t he should neglect them in favour of the mission
which he had set out to execute; also, he recognised that his first duty
was to secure the safety of his friends. He therefore perforce steeled
his heart, and pushed on toward the point at which the Spaniards had
effected the passage of the river, and where he consequently expected to
find the means of getting across. It was a gruesome journey, if a short
one, for every yard that he advanced the dead and wounded lay more
thickly piled together, until at length, by the margin of the river, the
prostrate bodies of friend and foe were so closely intermingled that he
found it difficult to progress at all without trampling them under foot,
while the now still night air positively reeked with the odour of blood!
It was awful beyond the utmost that the young Englishman's imagination
had ever pictured, and as he glanced about him with shrinking gaze and
rising gorge he again mentally execrated the leader to whose savagery
all those unspeakable horrors were due.

But now at last he was at the river, and now also he saw by what means
the Spaniards had finally succeeded in accomplishing the task of forcing
the passage of the barrier. A single glance at the contrivance was
sufficient to prove that the assailants possessed among them at least
one skilled engineer, for spanning the stream Jack saw an
extraordinarily light yet strong bridge, constructed entirely of bamboos
so lashed and braced together as to be capable of sustaining the weight
of a continuous column of men, two abreast, over its entire length. It
was fashioned upon the principle of the bowstring girder, and was
considerably longer than was actually needed--which Jack accounted for
by the fact that the Spaniards had been allowed no opportunity to gauge
the actual width of the river, and had therefore been obliged to guess
at it; yet, so light did it appear to be that he believed thirty men
might easily have handled and placed it in position. He quickly passed
across it, finding it perfectly firm to the tread, and then set out to
cross the open plain toward the distant camp. He had still his night
glasses with him, and as he went he frequently made use of them, as much
to avoid the risk of being detected by the sentries as to observe what
was passing in the camp; but from the outset he failed to detect the
presence of any sentries whatever, and gradually it began to dawn upon
him that the occupants of the camp, beli