In five minutes a hundred and five Highlanders, nine being officers, had blood pouring from their wounds; but 'Onward' was the cry, and as the Rifles came up in support, amid the ceaseless clatter of the breechloaders, 'for three hours after the Scottish and Welsh infantry had carried the village,' says the _Daily Telegraph_, 'the contest was obstinately maintained in the jungle, where it was difficult to see or reach the enemy, and quite as hard for him to know how the fight went upon other points. Assailed in their own wilderness, followed up foot by foot, the Ashantees fought well, but never gave a fair opportunity for the shock of a real charge.' As the Rifles advanced through the jungle in extended order, over ground which the fire of the 42nd had strewed with killed and wounded Ashantees, one of the latter, a colossal black savage, clad only with a middle cloth and string of beads, propping himself upon his elbow, shot Jerry's servant O'Farrel, in the back and killed him on the spot, as the ball passed through his heart. It was, perhaps, the last effort of expiring nature; but Jerry responded promptly with his revolver, and sent a bullet whistling through the brain of the Ashantee, who, as he was a man of fine proportions, was soon after eaten by the Kossos or wild cannibals of Colonel Wood's regiment, who, as Jerry said, 'felt peckish' after the fight. A Highlander lost himself in the bush, and came suddenly upon a cluster of retiring Ashantees, who shot him down by a volley and instantly cut off his head, which they carried away, as no trophy is more prized by this people than human heads, which formed the chief ornaments of the king's palace, and even of his bed-chamber in Coomassie. In the first days of February the passage of the Ordah followed, and on the night the troops bivouacked by its shore they were without tents, and the rain fell in merciless torrents, as if the windows of the sky had opened again, while thunder bellowed in the echoing woods, and green forked lightning lit up incessantly the bosom of the foaming river; yet more than ever were our troops anxious when day broke to begin the weary march--to reach Coomassie and grapple with the dusky enemy. The first human blood Jerry Wilmot had ever shed was when he pistolled the Ashantee who murdered--for murder it was--poor O'Farrel. He had handled his revolver then promptly, if mechanically, and thought afterwards--strange to say--with a little sense of disgust over the episode, and the aspect of the dead negro, his yellow eye-balls turned back within their sockets, his fallen jaw, and oozing brain, had actually haunted him. But since then, in skirmishing, both in the bush and open, Jerry had, as he phrased it, 'potted three or four more of the beggars,' as coolly as if they had been black-cocks on a Highland moor. While the Naval Brigade halted at Ordashu, the Black Watch, with half a battalion of the Rifles, pushed on towards Coomassie.