“No, but for some reason or other he’d rather have our room than our company, and the best road towards that is to get rid of us. I had my eye on him from the very beginning, luckily. I saw him start shoving at that tree, and the only way to stop you dead short was to invent that snake-bite lie, just as the only way to make you clear the spring-gun string was to give you the shove I did. You let it off, but the sudden pitch forward just cleared the charge.”
“Well, if he gets up to anything of that sort openly I shall shoot,” said Wyvern decisively.
“So shall I,” said Fleetwood, with equal decision.
The while the subject of these remarks, having solaced his feelings by thrashing one of his dependents, and getting considerably drunk, was arriving at the conclusion that the process of “taking care of” Wyvern was not going to prove as easy as it looked, and that he himself had begun upon it very badly indeed.
Chapter Twenty Two.
The Opal.
An amphitheatre of bush and krantzes, the latter fringed on the sides and brink with the feathery droop of forest trees: dark, lateral kloofs running steeply up into the face of the heights: beyond the silence of a great wilderness, but enhanced by the varying bird voices upon the heat of the still atmosphere, or the hum of insects and the chirrup of crickets; and, over all, the deep blue arch of an unclouded sky.
Wyvern wiped his wet face with his wet handkerchief and gasped. He realised that he was getting limp—the enervating limpness produced by the torrid, up-country, steamy heat, and, proportionately, was getting depressed. So far they seemed no nearer their goal. They had searched, always with the greatest caution, but without success, or even a clue; and Hlabulana, their guide, seemed not nearly so confident now they had reached the locality as he had seemed when he made his statement to Fleetwood. In brief he was puzzled but would not own to it—only put them off in his vague native way. Added to which Joe Fleetwood had been more than once down with rather a bad attack of old up-country fever; in fact he was lying in camp at that moment not able to get about. But Wyvern, leaving him in the care of Hlabulana and Mtezani, the young Zulu to whom they had afforded asylum when the Usutus had pursued him right into their camp—and that under strict orders not to lose sight of him until his own return—had started forth, in his wearied impatience, to see if he could get no nearer the difficulty of solving matters.