Roden was up in a moment. With the quickness of a snake he had seized the Kaffir by the throat before the latter could rise, and had pressed the muzzle of his revolver to the man’s face.
The shout of dismay and of warning which arose to the lips of the savage died in his throat. The black, murderous shining ring of the muzzle seemed to burn through him even as though already he felt the contents. The countenance of his white adversary was terrific in its fell fury of purpose, for it was the face of a thoroughly desperate man, balancing unsteadily on the brink of that precipice, which is Death.
“One sound,” whispered Roden, in Boer Dutch. “Only one sound!” and his look supplied the rest.
Kaffirs are the most practical of mortals. This one was a thick-set and sinewy savage, and were it a hand to hand tussle with his white adversary in which muscular strength alone counted, would have stood every chance. But the first movement would mean the pressure of that deadly trigger, and a head blown to atoms. One shout would have brought his countrymen swarming around him, and the white man would be cut to ribbons in a moment. But that would not result in bringing himself back to life, nor in piecing together again his own head, shattered to a thousand fragments; wherefore he deemed it sound policy to lie still as ordered.
But as he lay there, breathing hard and staring with protruding and amazed eyeballs at the face of the man who threatened him, even the terror of his position could not restrain a smothered gasp; for it was the expression of a mighty astonishment. And his amaze communicated itself to Roden, who by the fast increasing light, now recognised in the countenance of this ferocious-looking and ochre-smeared warrior the honest lineaments of the good-humoured and civil store-boy, Tom.
Yes, it was Tom; each had recognised the other now—Tom, who had come to him like Nicodemus, by night, at the instigation of that unscrupulous rascal Sonnenberg, to endeavour to entrap him into a flagrant violation of the ammunition laws, by inducing him to sell the old gun—Tom who had so deftly turned the tables afterwards upon his scoundrelly employer. Well, he had a gun now, for there it lay beside the assegais, which had escaped from his hand as he fell.
“I know you, Tom,” he whispered in Dutch. “I won’t harm you if you go away and don’t tell the others I’m here.”
The Kaffir stared. “Auf!” he exclaimed; “let me go, Baas. I’ll say nothing.”
Roden looked into the dark, ochre-smeared face. Even beneath this hideous disguise it had an honest look.
“I trust you, Tom,” he said. “Listen, I have not seen you here, you understand, when I return to Doppersdorp, and you—you have not seen me now.”