LITMIR.BIZ

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had travelled "light," with only rifle and bayonet and one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition, but even this lightness had been too heavy for some. The more coffee and quinine for the rest! To give variety to the sufferings of fatigue, fever, hunger, thirst, and dysentery, the Dahomeyans frequently attacked in the numerical superiority of a hundred to one. No mean opponents either, with their up-to-date American rifles and batteries of Krupp guns for long range work, and their spears and machetes for the charge.

      As usual, the Legion was marking its trail with the generous distribution of the graves of its sons.

      And now the VIIth Company had left swamp and jungle for the floating ovens Corail and Opale. Terrific heat, but no sunshine; the "landscape" minatory, terrible; life, the acme and essence of discomfort and misery. Even the Senegalese boatmen seemed affected and depressed.

      "Say, John! Is this-yer penny-steamboat trip fer the saloobrity of our healths?" asked the Bucking Bronco, in a husky voice, of his neighbour le Légionnaire Jean Boule or John Bull. The old soldier wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve.

      "I overheard Commandant Faraux telling Colonel Dodds that there is a ford up here somewhere, and that it must be found and seized," he answered wearily. "I expect we're looking for it now."

      "Well, I ain't got it. Search me!" said the American. "I allow Ole Man Farrow's got another think comin' if he..."—a ragged crash of musketry from the bank a hundred yards distant, and the ironwork of the Opale rang again under a hail of bullets.

      In ten seconds the Légionaries were lining the sand-bagged bulwarks with loaded rifles at the "ready."

      "Oh, the fools—the silly bunch o' boobs!" murmured the Bucking Bronco. "I allow thet's torn it! The pie-faced pikers hev sure wafted the bloom off the little secret."

      "Yes," agreed John Bull, "you'd have thought even Behanzin's generals would have had the sense to lie low and not announce themselves until we'd got our column fairly tied up in the middle of the ford." ...

      The roar of Hotchkiss guns and Lebel rifles from the two boats drowned his further remarks, as well as the irregular crashings of the bursts of Dahomeyan musketry....

      The debarkation of the VIIth Company was unhindered, the ford seized, and the safe passage of the Expeditionary Force guaranteed, the Dahomeyans having retired.

      "Waal!" remarked the Bucking Bronco to his friend as half the VIIth Company moved off next morning, as Advance Guard. "Strike me peculiar ef thet ain't the softest cinch I seen ever. Guess Ole Man Behanzin ain't been to no West Point Academy. They say his best men is women—an' I kin believe it!"

      "Amazons," remarked Jean Boule. "I pray we don't come across any. Fancy shooting at women."

      "You smile your kind, fatherly smile at 'em, John, an' I allow they'll come an' eat outer yer hand.... Are they really fightin'-gals, with roof-garden hats an' shirt-waists, and mittens on their pasterns? ... Gee-whiz! Guess I'll take a few prisoners an' walk with a proud tail!"

      "They're women, all right," was the reply, "and I believe they are as dangerous as dervishes—apart from any question of one's not shooting to kill when they charge.... If all I've heard about them is true, chivalry is apt to be a trifle costly."

      "Waal, John, as Légionnaires, we ain't habituated to luxury any, and can't afford nawthen costly. Ef any black gal lays fer me with an axe—it's a smackin' fer hers."

      "Yes—but what are we going to do if an Amazon regiment opens an accurate and steady fire on us with Winchester repeaters and then charges with the bayonet?"

      "Burn the trail for Dixie," grinned the American. "I guess we'd hit the high places some, an' roll our tails for Home. Gee-Whillikins! Charged by gals!"

      "That's all very well," grumbled the Englishman, "but the Legion doesn't run, either from men or from women. If an Amazon regiment charges us, we've got to fight.... It would be ghastly."

      Even as he spoke the deadly silent forest suddenly gave birth to thousands of black shadows, all moving swiftly and noiselessly, and from all directions, upon the tiny column of the Advance Guard.

      With one accord, at some signal, they halted, rested the butts of their rifles on their thighs, fired, and then, howling like devils, charged with great élan, led by a number of tall, muscular women, handsome and finely made.

      "Gals!" gasped the American, as the column instinctively halted, faced outwards in two ranks, and poured magazine fire into the dense masses of the charging savages.

      "Look at her!" he cried, and pointed to a young woman, who, bare to the waist, and wearing a fez cap, a short blue cotton kilt, and a leather belt and cartridge-cases, came bounding straight toward him. In her right hand she brandished a thick-backed, heavy chopping-sword like a coupe-coupe or machete, and in her left carried a bright new repeating-carbine. Nothing could have been more dashing, courageous, and inspiring than the leading of this Fury, as she rushed straight for the levelled rifles of the Legionaries, waving her men on and yelling mingled words of encouragement, threat, and taunt at them as she strove to bring them to the consummation of the charge.

      Her efforts were in vain, however. The Dahomeyan male warrior is not of very heroic stuff, and does his best fighting in a surprised camp, a broken square, or against a scattered line. His métier is the ambush, the rush at dawn, the hacking and hewing hundred-to-one fight in dense jungle where the foe cannot form or charge, the tree-top sniping, the trampling flat of a worn-out enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

      Before the steady fire of an unbroken line he generally wilts away, and vanishes shadow-like into the impenetrable depths of his native jungle, to try another surprise, another ambush, another dawn-rush of ten thousand men, at the next opportunity.

      As usual, beneath the accurate fire that mowed them down in swathes, the Dahomeyans broke and fled, slowly followed by their Amazon leaders, who shrilly cursed, and fiercely struck at, the retiring faint-hearts.

      Just as the "cease-fire" whistle blew, the woman who had been charging at the Bucking Bronco and John Bull (and who had stood screaming at her followers as they halted, faltered, and broke) threw up her arms and fell.

      "That weren't me," quoth the Bucking Bronco, "an' I hope it was a dod-gasted accident. She was some gal, that gal. Let's have a look at her if we ain't agoin' to charge nor nawthen."

      The officer commanding the Advance Guard was certainly not going to charge. He was only too thankful to have beaten off the sudden and well-executed attack. How marvellously the brutes had materialized from the apparently uninhabited forest, still silent and gloomy as the tomb. But what fools! That force alone, properly handled, and attacking while the column was in the middle of the wide deep ford, might have told a very different story.

      "Bugler," called he, "blow the 'alarm' and the 'regimental-call' till your veins crack and your lungs burst.... No—turn toward the river, sot, I want the main body to hear.... Sergeant-Major, send two of the strongest running back with this." ...

      They were the last words he spoke. The Amazons themselves were charging this time—a whole regiment—and no regiment in this world ever charged with greater dash, courage, violence, and determination. Firing as they came, and utterly disregarding the steady magazine-fire of the Legionaries, they swept down upon them like an avalanche—like cavalry—and burst upon the little line, through it, and over it, like a hailstorm across a wheatfield.

      Rushing at Captain Roux, one fired her Spencer carbine into his chest, while another drove a spear into his abdomen. As he fell, a third stooped and deliberately hacked off his head with her chopping-knife. There was no question of "sparing women" as these furies, each as big and strong and well-armed as any Legionary, hacked, hewed, and thrust, or, kneeling a few yards from their victims, gave them the contents of the magazines of their carbines.

      While parrying the fierce thrusts of one stalwart virago, John Bull, struck on the head from behind by two assailants at once, fell to the ground, even as his eye had subconsciously taken in and

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