Chapter X: At Cape Coast

'What is he--who is he?' asked the voice of one in authority, of one evidently used to command, and who was on horseback.

'An officer of the Rifle Brigade, sir,' replied another.

'Dead, of course?'

'No, sir, but half dead of famine apparently. He looks pale enough, and his haversack is empty.'

'How comes he to be here, and alone? Poor fellow, he must have fallen out on Sir Garnet's line of march, and been left in the rear.'

Such were the welcome utterances in English which Jerry Wilmot heard with joy and astonishment, as, weakly and voiceless, he struggled up on his hands and arms, and looked around him again, to find a mounted officer stooping from his saddle, regarding him with interest and curiosity, while twenty armed natives of a savage and foreign race jabbered and gesticulated violently as they lifted him from the ground, and the other European who had spoken applied a flask of brandy to his lips--a requisite stimulant, of which Jerry partook gratefully, while joy gushed up in his heart to find that he was, so far as he could see, saved.

And now to account for this mystery.

It is well known that four days after the destruction of Coomassie, that city of wigwams in a woody wilderness, a single British officer, attended by only twenty African soldiers, rode through the still smouldering ruins, and found no inhabitants remaining.

This officer was Captain Reginald Sartorius, of the 6th Bengal Cavalry, who had been sent by Captain Glover, R.N., to report to Sir Garnet Wolseley that he was advancing, and was now within eighteen miles of the city with his subordinate column, the operations of which lie somewhat apart from our story, though we may briefly state that 'the original scheme, and the elaborate attempt of a campaign starting from the Volta river, with from ten thousand to fifteen thousand warriors of several nations, had not indeed been carried out. The native kings had willingly accepted British money, and flint-lock muskets for their men; but their idea of invading Ashantee was to go away in another direction, and make war on people out of the Gold Coast Protectorate, and beyond the range of its policy. Neither at Addah nor at Accra could we get a real hold of the allies, upon whom Captain Glover had reckoned. He had, therefore, been instructed by Sir Garnet to conduct his own reliable force of Houssas and Yorabas by a given route across the Prah, and join our main body at Coomassie.'

In obedience to orders, and to report the approach of this force, at mid-day on the 10th of February Captain Sartorius, starting from a point which he believed to be only seven miles distant from that place, began one of the most daring rides recorded in the annals of war, and for which he won deservedly the Victoria Cross.

Certain of meeting Sir Garnet at Coomassie, he departed without provisions, and, after a rough ride of eleven miles through a wild and terrible country, he found himself when night fell at a village seven miles distant from it. There strange and startling rumours prevailed among the women, for the men had all gone elsewhere. Coomassie, they told him, was no more, and its destroyers had departed.

Captain Sartorius sent messengers to Captain Glover, stating that Sir Garnet would only be a day's march off, and could easily be overtaken; but these messengers were fired on in the bush, and no tidings reached the naval officer.

Moving on with caution, next day Sartorius approached Coomassie, which was still shrouded in clouds of dark smoke, amid which the red flames were smouldering, and was met by a woman, who informed him that 'the king and all his young warriors were in the town raging over its destruction, and vowing vengeance for it.' Three houses alone had escaped the conflagration.

Aware that scant mercy would be shown to him and his twenty brave followers if taken, he quickly left that place of horrors behind him. Believing that he was now equi-distant between Captain Glover and Sir Garnet, he bravely resolved to follow up the latter, a fortunate circumstance for the luckless Jerry Wilmot, who was found in the very track his party was pursuing.

'Come, my good friend,' said he, after he had heard Jerry's story in a few words, 'you must pull yourself together and make an effort, as we must push on without a moment's delay.'

An effort--yes, thought Jerry gleefully, though he was weak, faint, and feverish, for his adventures in the moist and pestiferous bush were telling on him now. But for the advent of Captain Sartorius, what must his fate inevitably have been? He was mounted on the horse of a messenger, who had been shot in the bush, and now rode on with his rescuers. The sheet of water which had barred his way so long they forded, the water rising to their saddle-girths, and then they pushed on, hoping to reach the bridge constructed by our engineers across the Ordah. It had been swept away! But the waters which destroyed it had subsided, and where that waste of water, so troublesome to our troops, once rolled, the ground was dry and even hard, but the odours that loaded the air from the bodies of the slain Ashantees lying in the bush, left Captain Sartorius and his companions in no doubt of their being on the line of march followed by Sir Garnet Wolseley.

Poor Jerry had felt himself like one in an evil dream when he found his limbs so powerless that he was incapable of resistance and sinking on the earth. Now he felt also in a dream, and could scarcely realise that he was mounted, with friends and on the homeward way, for he was half dead with weakness, and, if not rescued when he was, he must have succumbed very soon after. Keenly had he realised the fact that

'Past and to come seem best, things present worst.'

Some one proffered him a cigar--a luxury, to a smoker a necessity--which he had been without for days, and he took it thankfully, gratefully, and never did he forget the pleasure that cigar afforded him; but the toil of the journey, after all the blood he had lost and all the mental and bodily suffering he had undergone, told sorely upon the nerves and system of Jerry, though a hardy and active young Englishman, who had never figured second in the hunting or cricket fields, had been stroke oar of the Oxford boat, and up to everything in the way of sport that was manly and stirring. But he dug his knees into his saddle, and even when his head, through very weakness, was almost bowed on his horse's mane, he thought of Bella Chevenix, and bravely, as he phrased it, 'strove to keep up his pecker.'

So onward the party progressed amid scenery clothed with strange trees, strange flowers, and gigantic plants, with long spiky blade-like leaves, such as we only see in a botanical garden at home.

There was a lurid sunset, and the hills were as those of heaven, as described by Dante, 'like sun-illumined gold,' when the party of Sartorius drew near Amoaful, scaring away all Ashantees who approached him, and then when night fell he came upon a wounded Houssa who had fought against us, but gave him the pleasant intelligence that the British troops were at no great distance--at Fomannah--where Sir Garnet halted four days, and messengers came from the King of Ashantee with 1,000 ounces of gold, and the latter received a treaty of peace in return.

The lonely march was resumed in the morning, and at Fomannah Jerry Wilmot and Sartorius, with his twenty men, after having marched, each with arms and forty rounds of ammunition, for fifty-five miles, overtook the retiring troops of Sir Garnet Wolseley.

Jerry now had 'that ugly knock on his sconce,' as he called it, properly dressed and attended to by the medical staff, in whose hands he found poor Dalton done nigh unto death by wounds, and borne among the sick in a hammock, and ere long Jerry was the occupant of another, prostrated by fever, and unconscious of most that followed.

Oblivious of the struggle of the night march to the village of Akanquassie, through a moonless, starless, and pitchy blackness never equalled; through a swamp, over a precipitous hill, and anon through a forest, where every moment one ran against a tree, had the helmet knocked off by a bough, the face scratched by twigs and spiky shrubs, or the foot stumbled over a great gnarled root; yet the voices of the officers and men rang cheerily out as they encouraged each other.

'Close up--close up. Now then, my lads!'

'This way--this way. Look out!'

'For what?'

'A deep pool of water.'

'Mind that root! mind that branch!'

'Hurrah, lads! Forward!'

And as the dawn stole in the men of the 1st West Indian Regiment, who escorted the party of sick in hammocks, seemed to Jerry's eyes most ghastly in their light grey clothing and white helmets; and it was said that 'the negro so dressed looked like a convict who had been hung until black in the face and cut down.'

And often as he tossed in his hammock, which was slung on a pole dhooley-wise, he would mutter,

'Oh, if Dalton had only let that ---- beetle alone!'

Cape Coast Castle was reached by the entire force in pretty good condition; but, as an idea of the extent to which fever had raged among them, we may mention that of the Naval Brigade, which, including marines, landed two hundred and seventy-eight strong, there came back only one hundred and nineteen men.

All the rest had found their last homes in the awful solitude of the untrodden bush.

Apart from sorrow lest he should never more see Laura and his little daughter so lately found and known, Dalton had a great horror of finding such a tomb, and being left so far away; and the funeral of a brother officer, Captain H----, who had died at Essiman of fever, haunted him like a dream.

He remembered how the forest re-echoed to the three death volleys over the lonely grave, which lay in a beautiful spot, certainly so far as tropical flowers and foliage went, and had as a headstone a stately cotton-tree; but ages may elapse ere the foot of a white man treads near it again.

All the fire of the soldier seemed to have gone out of Tony Dalton; and for a time only the ailing and pitiful invalid remained; and he longed intensely for the presence and the ministering tenderness of the brilliant Laura--more perhaps to feel in his the little white hand of Netty--the _enfant terrible_ of the past time at Chilcote Grange.

Genuine hope first expanded the hearts of Dalton and Jerry, and in the hearts of many more, when they heard the pipes of the Black Watch strike up--

'Oh, why left I my hame?
Why did I cross the deep?'

announcing that the white walls of Cape Coast Castle were in sight, rising apparently sheer out of the jungle, and that beyond them lay our stately ships of war, and the free rolling waves of the blue highway that led to home and 'Old England.'

'Rescued, safe, spared to see the white cliffs again--home and Bella!' murmured Jerry.

Of his mother, though a warm-hearted fellow, he scarcely thought, or if so, it was in this fashion:

'By nature icy, with all her beauty and pride of place, she is my mother, true; but what has she done for me? As a child, she never caressed me, as other fellows' mothers did--no, by Jove, nor tucked me in my little bed, nor gave me toys or sweets. Did I ever see her read her Bible in church, or teach me to say a prayer at her knee? She only cared to see me prettily dressed, that I might outshine other women's children, but left me otherwise to hang as I grew; and, by Jove, it is a wonder I didn't grow up a worse fellow than I have done!'

With half a world of waters between them, these were hard thoughts for a son to have of his mother; but Lady Wilmot had inspired them herself.

Both Dalton and Jerry were in such a bad plight from their wounds, and the latter especially from exposure in the bush, that the doctors doubted much if they would 'pull through' after the embarkation, as they were ever and anon tossing on the troubled tide of a jungle-fever that threatened to bear them both away to the shores of 'the Promised Land,' with a grave in the tropical sea.