The hours followed each other, and even the live creatures of the wilderness ceased to fear the motionless sleeping form of the young adventurer, but a year ago a hearty unsophisticated English schoolboy, now the bearer of his own life and the lives of others; thrown upon his own resources, alone, in the then scarcely known wilds of northern Zululand. Birds began to flit from spray to spray, balancing themselves on swaying twig, and chirruping and twittering just over the sleeper’s head. Little lizards, creeping along the face of the rocky boulder, dropped upon the sleeping form and ran tentatively over it, and a bush-buck, stepping gingerly through the hollow, turned its full bright eye upon the prostrate figure, and resumed its way as though finding no cause for alarm.
Hour followed hour, and now the sun’s rays began to decline, to slant more and more horizontally upon the green sprays of the foliage. Gerard stirred uneasily in his sleep, for with the approach of the waking hour he was beginning to dream again. Once more he was in the Igazipuza kraal with Dawes, discussing the seriousness of the situation. He had made the attempt to escape, and was being brought back—had been brought back. And then into his dreams there stole a vague sense of danger, strange, indefinable, but none the less present. It was fearful. Some weight was upon him, boding, terrible. He could neither straggle nor call out. Then breaking the spell with a mighty effort, he started up from his sleep—awoke to a reality more fearsome, more formidable than the nightmarish delusion. For, as he started up into a sitting posture, he nearly brought his face into contact with a dark grim visage which was peering into it, and a cry of surprise, dismay, despair escaped him. He was surrounded by a crowd of armed Zulus!
Chapter Twenty.
An Error of Judgment.
Never in the whole course of his hard, chequered, adventurous life, could John Dawes recall a day spent in such wearing, intolerable suspense, as that following the night of his young companion’s escape. That it was an escape he now entertained no doubt. The hours wore on, and still no return of a triumphant band bringing with it the recaptured fugitive. This augured well as regarded Gerard.
As regarded himself the trader knew that any hour might be his last. There was an ominous stillness brooding over the Igazipuza kraal following on the night of furious revelry. None of its denizens came near him; but for all that he knew that every one of his movements was intently watched. Try as he would he could not altogether conceal his anxiety from his own people. The Swazis cowered beneath the waggons in terror, and even the sturdier Natal natives, with their strong admixture of Zulu blood, sat together in gloomy silence. Every one of them, however, had a short stabbing assegai concealed beneath his blanket, ready to sell his life as dearly as possible, and these preparations they hardly took the trouble to dissemble from the chief’s councillor, Sonkwana, who still remained at the waggons, squatting on the ground tranquilly taking snuff from time to time, a very model of taciturnity.
Thus the day wore on, and still no sign of the returning pursuit. With great good luck Gerard would have reached the king’s kraal by that time to-morrow. Then from speculating as to how his brave young companion had fared, Dawes’s mind went back to the scene of the previous night. His shaft had told. The threat to appeal to Cetywayo had not been without its effect upon Ingonyama, and that effect a considerable one. Still, with morning no message of emancipation had come from the chief, and Dawes did not think it advisable once more to trust himself within the kraal; and not being the man to ask another to go where he preferred not to venture himself, he refrained from sending one of his servants upon this errand. Still he was very uneasy.
Still more uneasy would he have been, could he have overheard the conference then proceeding in the chief’s hut. Seated around in a half circle, Ingonyama, Vunawayo, and some three or four councillors were engaged in earnest discussion, the subject nothing less than the advisability of putting him and his to the assegai forthwith. The chief could hardly contain his chagrin and impatience.