They had come slowly and hesitatingly perhaps sixty yards, and I was racking my brain as to some means of helping them, when suddenly the old man stopped dead, then shot forward on to his face, pulling the girl to the ground. I could see him as he lay; he only moved once, and up from between his shoulders stuck a long arrow-shaft. What happened after that will take a long time to tell, though it took but a few minutes to act. The girl writhed herself up again, and bent piteously over the old man. Then she dragged herself to her knees, and stayed looking at the gate. At first I had hesitated. One did not want to introduce one’s self to a new country by attacking the local police in the execution of their legitimate--if unpleasant--duties. But the sight of the girl decided me. This could be no decent form of justice. I laid my rifle down by Payindah and said: “Shoot into the loopholes. Shoot like hell!” As his rifle spoke, I was slipping off the rock, and a second later I was out in the open, my big hunting-knife in my hand, running as I hadn’t run since I played outside left for my regiment before the war. Payindah was not much in the brain line as far as education went. But even before the war, when straight shooting was the common possession of most regular soldiers, he stood out as a marksman. And his star specialty was rapid shooting. I have seen him put thirteen shots into a two-foot target at two hundred yards in thirty seconds, and do it often. As I ran over the stones, picking my way among the scattered heaps of what had once been men, I heard the steady rapid crack of his rifle behind me, and before me I could catch the “smack” “smack” of the bullets about the arrow-slits. The men inside were evidently not accustomed to firearms, and the sudden noise--magnified by the enclosed space, and, as we learnt later, the effect of the shots that went home--paralyzed them. Probably another factor in saving us was my utterly unexpected appearance in that place of death, where no living being, save captives stripped and bound, had ever been seen before. Possibly, for a minute or two, they--a superstitious, half-savage people--took me for an evil spirit. Anyway, not a single arrow was fired at me as I tore across the clearing. The girl, hearing the noise behind, turned her head bewilderedly, and then, seeing me leaping over the stones, struggled to her feet. I don’t know what she took me for, but with the knife bare in my hand she probably thought me Death in some new form. But she stood there bravely facing me with steady eyes, her poor arms cruelly twisted behind her back, her red-gold hair falling in a loose bundle on one shoulder, her breath coming quickly between her parted lips.