“D’you mean to say you’ve blown up your own house, Lamont?”
“Not me—but the confiding savage who’d called to cut our three throats while we were asleep—as he thought. We knew he would, and—he did.”
“By Jove, what a sell for them! Why, you’re a genius, Lamont!” pronounced Ancram admiringly.
“Anyhow,” said Peters, “it’s been the saving of our lives so far, for otherwise, directly they found we weren’t in the place, they’d have started out to look for us. Now they won’t, because there’ll be few enough left to do it, and those’ll be more’n sick of us by this time.”
“It’ll be the saving of the lives of a good many white men, when the news spreads, as it soon will,” appended Lamont. “It’ll make ’em think twice before they meddle with houses in future—too much tagati about the job—and so our fellows will get a show.”
He was thinking, too, of the stories he had filled up old Qubani with, on the Gandela race-course, as to how the ground immediately around the township was extensively mined; and now this last manoeuvre of his would go to confirm it. The savage has a holy horror of unseen danger. He might, indirectly, have been the means of again saving Gandela, at a very perilous and critical time. Then he fell to wondering whether Clare Vidal was already away and safe at Buluwayo.
Day broke upon an expanse of wild, hilly country, moderately bushed. Huge baboons barked at them from their fastnesses among the piles of craggy boulders which heaved up here and there against a drear and lowering sky, and which seemed a perfect rookery of predatory birds—falcons and buzzards and kites—soaring and circling aloft. And now a halt was called.
“About time too,” groaned Ancram. “I don’t believe I could have gone a step farther.”
The other two made no comment upon this, but both were thinking the same thought. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and that link in this chain spelt Ancram. He was dead tired already, he declared, and his boots were wearing holes in his feet into the bargain. And the situation was serious enough in itself. They had no doubt but that the whole native population was up in arms, and here they were, only three, and afoot at that, in the heart of the hostile ground. True they were well-armed, and two of them, at any rate, resolute and full of resource; but even that wouldn’t count for much with an entire population against them.
“Well, see how you feel after a feed, Ancram,” said Lamont. “We can rest here a bit too. In fact, it’s none too safe travelling in the daytime at all.”