“Well, it’s a fact that for some years past not a man Jack who has gone into that kloof from this end—and you can’t get into it from anywhere else—has come out alive,” answered the old man. “When searched for and spoored down, they were found quite near the entrance, stone dead.”
“What killed them?”
“That’s what many of us would like to know. There was a mark, just where the neck joins the shoulder at the back, a tiny mark hardly bigger than a pin-point, a mere discoloration, and the bodies wore every appearance of death by snake-bite. That’s how the place got its name—Slaang—or Snake Kloof.”
“By Jove! And what sort of a snake was it?” said Dick.
“There was no snake. The most careful search revealed no trace of the spoor of anything of the kind. Besides, a snake-bite invariably contains two punctures. This was only one. Another strange thing is that the mark was always the same, and in the same place, where the neck joins the shoulder; and yet another—that the people, when found, had, in each case, fallen when facing the way out of the kloof, as if they’d been running away from something. What? How many have come to grief? Seven in all—one Hottentot and six Kafirs. They had gone in after strayed stock, or to take out a bees’ nest, or something of the kind. The Hottentot was the only one who was still conscious, and he knew absolutely nothing of what had happened to him or when it had. I nearly pulled him through by treating him for snake-bite, but it was too long after, and he kicked the bucket, like the rest. Have I been in since? No. I’m too old.”
“But what on earth is your theory of it, Mr Hesketh?” asked Dick Selmes, who was very much impressed by the story, and the old man’s way of telling it. “Is there some kind of tree snake that drops down and swings itself up again after biting them? That would account for lack of spoor, you know.”
“Quite right, young buffalo hunter,” nodded old Hesketh. “But we’ve got no snakes that do that. All the tree sorts are harmless. The thing stumps me but—there it is.”
“By Jingo, but I’d like to—” And Dick stopped short. Old Hesketh turned on him a lack-lustre eye.
“To try and solve the mystery yourself?” he supplied. “M’yes. You’d better let it alone, young fellow. Keep your energies for another destroying buffalo, and you may come out of that with a whole skin. Eh, Greenoak?”
The latter, who had been a silent listener, nodded assent. Old Hesketh had—for him—taken an immense fancy to Dick since hearing of his shooting the buffalo bull in the Addo Bush, and that alone and with a single bullet. He was far too plucky a young fellow to be allowed to commit suicide in such an unsatisfactory cause as this, he decided.