With a hard ring and a splash of lead, the bullet flattened on the rock beside him, simultaneously with the roar of the report, which rolled, in a volley of echoes, among the surrounding krantzes.
“Bully Rawson, of course,” exclaimed Wyvern to himself, as he quickly got behind a rock to consider best as to how he should return the fire.
But this was not quite so easy, for the simple reason that his assailant kept closely concealed. A wreath of smoke hanging in front of a thick row of foliage fringeing the lip of a low krantz some hundred yards distant, showed the point of concealment. He realised too, into what a tight place he had got. His cover was totally inadequate, and whoever was making a target of him could not go on missing him all day. Indeed it was marvellous that he should have missed so easy a mark at all.
Again the superstition concerning the opal recurred to him. No sooner had he found the stone than he found himself in grave danger. Every moment now he expected another bullet. He would almost certainly never live to realise the bright fair future he had just been mapping out. Well, the brutal cowardly ruffian who had come out there to do him to death in the dark as it were, should not benefit by the clue he himself had discovered, and to this end, concealed by the rock, he scraped a hole in the soil and deposited the stone within it. Then he called out:—
“Rawson, you cowardly skulker. Haven’t you the pluck to meet me man to man? Come out and show yourself, can’t you?”
There was no reply.
“Oh, you’re plucky enough at thrashing defenceless women, and boys not a third of your size,” went on Wyvern. “Come out now and we’ll fight fair with anything you like. Come out, funk-stick.”
This time an answer came, or some sort of an answer, and it took the form of quick muttered voices in the Zulu tongue, together with the sound of a scuffle, and a clinking fall of small stones down the face of the krantz. Then a voice was raised—also in the Zulu tongue.
“Come up here, Nkose. Come up here. I have him fast.”
And Wyvern knew the voice for that of Mtezani, the young Zulu whose life they had saved, and he went.