“Quietly, Mr. Allen,” Laurence said, on his other side; the ensign was tugging clumsily at the knots holding him to one of Catherine’s midwingmen.

The mound was raised, and their captors were asleep, before they had more than half disentangled themselves. There was a noisy groaning of hippopotami in the darkness; it sounded very near-by at times, and occasionally one of the dragons would raise a sleepy head, listening, and make a quelling growl, which silenced all the night around them.

They worked more urgently now, and those of them already freed risked creeping from their places to help the others; Laurence worked with Catherine, whose slim fingers made quick work of the worst knots, and then he whispered softly, when they had loosed her man Peck, the last, “Pray take the others into the woods and do not wait for me; I must try and free Mrs. Erasmus.”

She nodded, and pressed the pocket-knife on him: dulled to uselessness, but at least a moral support; and then they quietly one by one crept into the forest, away from the camp, except for Ferris, who crawled over to Laurence’s side. “The guns?” he asked softly.

Laurence shook his head: the rifles had unhappily been bundled away, by their captors, into the rest of their baggage, which lay tucked beside the head of one of the snoring dragons: there was no way to get at them. It was dreadful enough to have to creep past the sleeping men, lying exhausted and sprawled upon the ground after the catharsis of their wake: every ordinary snuffled noise of sleep magnified a hundredfold, and the occasional low crackles of the fire, burning down, like thunderclaps. His knees were inclined to be weak, and some of his steps sagged, involuntarily, almost so they brushed the ground; he had to steady himself with a hand against the dirt.

Mrs. Erasmus was lying apart from the men, to one side of the fire, very near the head of the great red-brown dragon; his forelegs were curled shallowly to either side of her. She was huddled very small, with her hands tucked beneath her head; but Laurence was glad to see she did not seem to have been injured. She jerked almost loose when Laurence’s hand came over her mouth, the whites of her eyes showing all around, but her trembling quieted at once when she saw him; she nodded, and he lifted his hand away again, to help her to her feet.

They crept as softly away, and slowly, around the great taloned claw, the black horny edges serrated and gleaming with the red firelight, the dragon’s breath coming deep and evenly; his nostrils flared in their regular pace, showing a little pink within. They were ten paces away, eleven; the dark eyelid cracked, and the yellow eye slid open upon them.

He was up and roaring at once. “Go!” Laurence shouted, pushing Mrs. Erasmus onward with Ferris; his own legs would not answer quickly, and one of the men waking leapt upon him, taking him by the knees and to the ground. They fell wrestling in the dust and dirt, near the fire; Laurence grimly hoping for nothing more, now, than to cover the escape. It was a clumsy, drunken struggle, like the last rounds of a mill with both parties weaving and bloodied; both of them exhausted, and Laurence’s weakness matched by his opponent’s confusion of having been woken from sound sleep. Rolling upon his back, Laurence managed to lock an arm around the man’s throat, and pulled with all his might upon his own wrist to hold it; he lashed out with his booted foot to trip another who was snatching for his spear.

Ferris had pushed Mrs. Erasmus towards the forest; a dozen of the aviators were running out, to come to her aid, and to Laurence. “Lethabo!” the dragon cried—whatever the threat or meaning, it brought her to a distracted halt, looking around; the dragon was lunging for Ferris.

She called out in protest herself and, running back where Ferris had dived to the ground to evade in desperation, threw herself between, holding up a hand; the claw, descending, stopped, and the dragon put it down again before her.

This time the men set a watch, learning from their mistake, and tied them up closer by the fire: there would be no second attempt. The two small dragons had herded them back to the camp with contemptuous ease, and an air of practice; if in the process they had also stampeded a small herd of antelope, they did not mind that, and made a late supper to console themselves for the effort. They missed only Kettering, one of Harcourt’s riflemen, and Peck and Bailes, both harness-men; but the latter two stumbled demoralized back into camp and surrendered, early in the morning, with the intelligence that Kettering had been killed, trying to ford the river, by a hippo; their pale and nauseated expressions precluded any wish of knowing more.

“It was my name,” Mrs. Erasmus said, her hands tight around her cup of dark red tea. “Lethabo. It was my name when I was a girl.”

She had not been permitted to come and speak to them, but at her pleading they had at length consented to bring Laurence over, hobbled at the ankles with his wrists tied together before him, and one of the spearmen standing watch lest he try to reach towards her. The red-brown dragon himself was bent over their conversation alertly, with a malevolent eye on Laurence at every moment.

“Are these men of your native tribe, then?” he asked.

“The men, no. They are of a tribe, I think, cousins to my own, or allied. I am not very sure, but they can understand me when I speak. But—” She paused, and said, “I do not understand it properly myself, but Kefentse,” she nodded towards the great hovering beast, “says he is my great-grandfather.”

Laurence was baffled, and supposed she had misunderstood; or translated wrong. “No,” she said, “no; there are many words I do not remember well, but I was taken with many others, and some of us were sold together also. We called all the older men Grandfather, for respect. I am sure that is all it means.”

“Have you enough of the tongue to explain to him we meant no harm?” Laurence asked. “That we only sought the mushrooms—”

She made the halting attempt, but the dragon snorted in a disdainful manner before she had even finished. He at once insinuated his great taloned forehand between them, glaring as if Laurence had offered her an insult, and spoke to the men: they at once pulled Laurence to his feet and dragged him back to the line of prisoners.

“Well,” Chenery said, when Laurence had been tied up with them again, “it sounds a little promising: I dare say when she has had a chance to talk to him, she will be able to bring him round. And in the meantime, at least they do not mean to kill us, or I expect they would have done so already and saved themselves the trouble of our keep.”

For what motive they had been preserved, however, was quite unclear; there was no attempt made to question them, and Laurence was growing bewildered as their journey extended further and further, past what could ever have been the reasonable extent of the territory of a small tribe, even one in the possession of dragons. He might have thought they were circling about, to lose pursuit, but the sun during the day and the Southern Cross at night gave it the lie: their course was steady and purposeful, always north by north-east, veering only to bring them to a more comfortable situation for the night, or to running water.

Early the next day they stopped by a wide river, looking almost orange from its muddy bottom, and populated by more of the noisy hippopotami, which darted away through the water with surprising speed from the pouncing dragons, submerging through wide ripples to evade. At last one of them was served out, by the two small dragons cornering it from both sides, and laid down to be butchered in the clearing. Their captors had grown confident enough to untie a few of them to assist with the tedious labor, Dyer and Catherine’s young runner Tooke set to carrying water back and forth in a bowl, fetching it uneasily from the water’s edge: there was a substantial crocodile sleeping on the farther bank, whose green eye was wide open and fixed upon them; its flesh was evidently not a temptation to the dragons, for it showed not the least sign of fear.