"But what are these beasts?" was asked a second time, as the yelpings were heard more loudly than before. These yelps made Herbert start, for he remembered to have heard them during his first visit to the sources of Red Creek. "They are culpeux foxes!" he exclaimed.
"Forward!" shouted the sailor. And all arming themselves with hatchets, carbines, and revolvers, threw themselves into the lift and soon set foot on the shore.
Culpeux are dangerous animals when in great numbers and irritated by hunger, nevertheless the colonists did not hesitate to throw themselves into the midst of the troop. Their first shots vividly lighting up the darkness made their assailants draw back.
The chief thing was to hinder these plunderers from reaching the plateau, for the garden and poultry-yard would then have been at their mercy, and immense, perhaps irreparable mischief, would be the result, especially to the corn-field. But as the invasion of the plateau could only be made by the left bank of the Mercy, it was sufficient to oppose the culpeux on the narrow bank between the river and the cliff of granite.
This was plain to all, and, by Cyrus Harding's orders, they reached the spot indicated by him, while the culpeux rushed fiercely through the gloom. Harding, Gideon, Spilett, Herbert, Pencroft and Neb, posted themselves in impregnable line. Top, his formidable jaws open, preceded the colonists, and he was followed by Jup, armed with a knotty cudgel, which he brandished like a club.
The night was extremely dark; it was only by the flashes from the revolvers as each person fired that they could see their assailants, who were at least a hundred in number, and whose eyes were glowing like hot coals.
"They must not pass!" shouted Pencroft.
"They shall not pass!" returned the engineer.
But if they did not pass it was not for want of having attempted it. Those in the rear pushed on the foremost assailants, and it was an incessant struggle with revolvers and hatchets. Several culpeux already lay dead on the ground, but their number did not appear to diminish, and it might have been supposed that reinforcements were continually arriving over the bridge.
The colonists were soon obliged to fight at close quarters,
