To these, and such as these, this unfathomable tract of thirst-land was nothing. To the whisky-and-soda drinking Englishman, with his artificial wants, and general lack of resource and utter deficiency in the bump of locality, it was, as in the case of the one lying here, a tomb. To the lithe, serpentine savage, whose draught of water, and mess of coarse impupu, or mealie porridge—when he could get it—it was a joke. These two had learned this, and had turned it to account, even as they were about to turn it to account again. They had been on the spoor of the wanderer from the very first, with hardly more to eat or drink than he. But then, they had not started after spending a night toasting the Jameson Raid.
Now they looked at each other, and there was a complete inventory in each devilish glance. Summed up, it read: A suit of clothes; item a shirt, boots; item a revolver and a knife—which he was too exhausted and which they would not give him time to use; item a watch and chain—tradeable at some distant time and place; certainly some money—available immediately. The horse, too. They need not trouble about it now. They would find it easily enough afterwards, and then what a feast! Of a truth their Snake was favourable to them again!
There lay the victim—there lay the prey. Gliding like evil wood-demons from the edge of the trees they were over him now. One more glance exchanged. Each had got his rôle. The doomed man lay still, with eyes closed, and a churn of froth at the corners of the swollen lips. One slowly raised his axe to bring it down on the skull. The other gripped aloft his assegai. Both could not miss, and it was as well to provide against contingencies—when—
The fiend with the axe leapt high in the air, falling backward, then leaping half up again and performing a series of wondrous gyrations,—this simultaneously with a sharp crack from the cover opposite, on the farther side of the sluit,—shot fair and square and neatly through the head. The fiend with the assegai knew better than to waste time unprofitably by completing his stroke. He whirled round as on a pivot, darting within the friendly trees with the rapidity of a startled snake. But futilely. For one infinitesimal fraction of a second, Time decreed that that gliding, dark body should be in line with a certain slit-like vista in the mopani stems, and—Crack!—again. The second miscreant dropped, like a walking-stick you let fall on the pavement, and lay face downwards, arms outspread, motionless as his intended victim.
Then there was silence again in the mopani forest, where lay three motionless human bodies; dead silence, for—hours, it seemed. No; it was only minutes.
From among the trees lining the opposite side of the dry sluit, out of the burnt-up grass there now arose the figure of a man—a white man. He carried a .303 magazine rifle in his left hand, and a revolver of business-like size was slung round him in a holster. He was rather tall than not, and loose hung; but from the moment he put down his foot to step forth from his cover, you could discern a sinewy elasticity of frame which it would take any two men’s share of fatigue to overcome. His face was peculiar. Grey-bearded and high-nosed, it conveyed the impression of chronic whimsicality, especially just now, puckered with the chuckle which was convulsing its owner. But there was a steely clearness in the blue eyes, glancing straight from under the broad hat-brim, that you would rather not face looking at you from behind the sights of a rifle.
This curiously effective specimen of a guardian angel lounged across to the fellow-countryman whose life he had saved, and gazed down at the latter.
“Near go!” he ruminated. “Near a one as this Johnny Raw ’ll ever have again. Why? ’Cause it couldn’t be nearer. Good-looking feller whoever he is, but—he needn’t know too much. Heave up—ho!” And laying hold of the heels of the savage he had first shot, he proceeded to haul the corpse of that assassin, to the accompaniment of very nautical-sounding cries, to a sufficient distance as to be invisible to the intended victim when the latter should wake to consciousness.
“No; he needn’t know too much,” he repeated, returning to the sufferer. “Now then, mister, wake up and have a pull at this.”
“This” being a substantial water-bottle. Presumably there was something magnetic in its inviting gurgle—for the hitherto unconscious man opened his eyes, stared, then half leaping up made a wild snatch at the bottle.