The squalid, forbidding-looking savage advanced, his puckered face transformed with concern. Renshaw stared, and stared again. And then he recognised the familiar, if unprepossessing lineaments of his defaulting retainer—old Dirk.
The old Koranna rushed forward and knelt down at his master’s side, pouring forth a voluble torrent of questions in the Boer dialect. How had he come there? Where was he wounded? Who had dared to attack him? Those schelm Bosjesmenschen (Rascally Bushmen)! He would declare war against the whole race of them. He would shoot them all. And so on, and so on. But amid all his chatter the faithful old fellow, having discovered where the wound was, had promptly ripped off Renshaw’s boot.
Yes, there it was—the poisoned puncture of the Bushman arrow—livid and swollen. For a moment Dirk contemplated it. Then he bent down and examined it more attentively, probing it gingerly with his finger. The result seemed to satisfy him.
“Nay, what, Baasje (Literally, ‘little master.’ A term of endearment), you will not die this time. The thick leather of the boot has taken off nearly all the poison, and all the running you have had since has done the rest. Still, it was a near thing—a near thing. ’Maghtaag!—if the arrow had pierced you anywhere but through the boot you would have been a dead man long since. Not this time—not this time.”
“And the tiger, Dirk?” said Renshaw, with a faint smile. “You are indeed a mighty hunter.” For he remembered how often he had chaffed the old Koranna on his much vaunted prowess as a hunter, little thinking in what stead it should eventually stand himself.
“The tiger? Ja Baas. I will just go down and take off his skin before it gets pitch dark. Lie you here and sleep. You are quite safe now, Baas—quite safe. You will not die this time—’Maghtaag, no!”
So poor Renshaw sank back in a profound slumber, for he was thoroughly exhausted. And all through the hours of darkness, while the wild denizens of the waste bayed and howled among the grim and lonely mountains, the little weazened old yellow man crouched there watching beside him on that rocky ledge, so faithfully, so lovingly. His comrade—the white man—his friend and equal—had deserted him—had left him alone in that desert waste to die, and this runaway servant of his—the degraded and heathen savage—clung to him in his extremity, watched by his side ready to defend him if necessary at the cost of his own life.