Fortunately for Payne he managed to throw up his arm in time to save his head, or he would have fallen to the ground, brained by the terrific force of the blow. Fortunately, too, for him, his adversaries carried no assegais, or he would there and then have been stabbed through and through and his body flung over the adjacent cliff into the Kei, for he need expect no mercy from such foes. The land was almost in a state of war, and brutal outrages of this kind were only too terribly common. He made a furious blow at his opponent with the butt of his whip, but ineffectively, for at the moment of striking he felt himself seized by a powerful hand and dragged from his horse, which backed into the bushes terrified and snorting. Then nearly stunned by the fall he lay upon the ground, and the sky and earth and foliage all went round in one giddy, sickening whirl, and still he could see the gigantic figure of the savage, who, with glaring eyes and white gleaming teeth, was advancing upon him with kerrie upraised to strike, and he lay there, powerless even to avoid the blow. In a second it would fall, when—woof! something descended through the air, a large dark object darted between him and the sky, and his enemy fell heavily to the earth. He heard the clash of kerries in strike and parry, a fierce imprecation, and the ring of a pistol-shot; then he knew no more till he awoke to consciousness with some one bending over him and fanning his brow.
“Don’t move,” said the stranger. “Take it easy a little longer, and then you’ll feel better.”
Payne looked wonderingly at the dark sun-browned face bent over him, with the calm, resolute, blue-grey eyes and clear-cut features, and it seemed to him that he had seen the owner of it before.
“Oh, I feel all right now,” he said, raising himself upon one elbow and then sitting up. “A little muddled, you know, that’s all.”
“I venture to say that our friend here, feels ‘a little muddled,’” remarked the other, pushing with his foot the form of a prostrate Kafir.
Payne stood up, rather giddily, and recognised his assailant in the inert, motionless mass.
“I say, though, but the brute isn’t dead?” he said, with just a tinge of concern, bending over the fallen savage.
“He isn’t dead. A stirrup-iron properly handled is a grand weapon; but Kafir skulls are notoriously thick. The chances are a hundred to one, though, that yours would have been split at this moment, had that individual carried out his amiable little programme just then.”
“Of course—I was forgetting. You saved my life. Why, what an ungracious dog you must think me!”
“And I could have dropped the other two so nicely in their tracks,” continued the stranger, as if he had not heard Payne’s remark. “They both came at me with their kerries; but directly they saw this,”—producing a revolver—“off they went. I wanted to fell another chap, so I didn’t trot out the barker at first, till they began to think they had it all their own way, and pressed me so hard that I was obliged to. Lord, how they streaked it off!”