“Oh, it’s you, Miss Commerell!” he gasped.
“Yes—yes. Oh, my dear little boy, what does it all mean?” she wailed, her voice thrilling with horrified pity.
A gleam came into the boy’s eyes, and for the moment he seemed to forget his agony.
“I—plugged two of the devils,” he said—“two of them. One was Qota, our boy. He got the charge of buckshot, the other the bullet. Then they hit me on the head with a kerrie. Oh-h!”
He sank back groaning under a renewed spasm of pain. This, then, was the double shot Nidia had heard. She saw now the meaning of the bloody trail which she had imagined was that made by the youthful hunter dragging home his quarry. The miscreants had dragged away the bodies of their own dead. Two of them had been sent to their account, red-handed, and that by this mere child, either in defence of those who were all to him, or revengeful in his rage and grief. Bit by bit she got at the truth.
He was returning from an unsuccessful stalk, and had gained the outside of the bush behind the house, when he heard a low prolonged scream proceeding from within. In this he recognised the voice of his mother. Cocking his gun, he ran hurriedly forward, but before he could gain the front door he was met by several savages armed with axes and knobkerries. Two of these he immediately shot—shot them dead, too, he declared—and then, before he could slip in fresh cartridges, they were upon him. The gun was wrenched from his hand, then something seemed to fall upon his head, for after that he knew no more.
All this was told spasmodically between lengthened pauses, and the effort had quite exhausted the poor little fellow. And now some inkling of the situation seemed to rush through Nidia’s reeling brain, though even then the idea that this wholesale murder was but one instance of several at that very moment throughout the land, did not occur to her. She supposed it to be a mere sporadic outbreak of savagery, or lust of plunder. It was clear, too, that this poor child was ignorant of all that had actually happened within, and she felt a sort of miserable consolation in realising that physical agony had so confused his mind that he showed no curiosity on the subject. Nor would he allow her to examine the extent of his hurts. If she so much as touched him he screamed aloud; but she knew, as confidently as though assured by the whole faculty, that his hours were numbered.
“I feel sleepy. How dark it is!” he murmured at length.
Dark! Why, the surroundings were in a very bath of lustre—of golden sunlight glow.
“So sleepy. Don’t leave me. Promise you won’t leave me!”