“Isipau! Ha! Isipau!”
“Quick, Spence! Get up behind me. Quick!”
The other needed no second bidding. As the horse with its double burden—either of these, singly, would have been a sufficient one for the poor brute, blown as he was—started once more, the foremost line of the savages was barely two hundred yards distant. Leaping, bounding, uttering their blood-curdling war-hiss, they reckoned their prey secure. The horse, weighted like that could never distance them. They would overtake it long before camp should be reached. Already they gripped their assegais.
“Sit tight, Spence, or you’ll pull us both to the ground,” said Hilary, with a sardonic suspicion that if the other saw a chance of throwing him off without risking a similar fate himself, he was quite mean enough to seize it. “Sit light too, if you can, and spare the horse as much as possible.”
Down into a hollow, and here, in the bed of a dry watercourse, the game steed stumbled heavily, but just saved his footing, and thereby the lives of his two riders. Bullets flew humming past now, but it seemed that the din of their pursuers was further behind, and indeed such was the case, for they arrived at the laager at the same time as the rescued troop horses.
“Good God! Blachland! You are a splendid fellow, and I owe you my life,” gasped the rescued man. “But what must you think of me?” he added shamefacedly.
“No more no less than I did before,” was the curt reply. “Get off now. You’re quite safe.”
“You ought to get the V.C. for this,” went on Spence.
But the other replied by coupling that ardently coveted decoration with a word of a condemnatory character. “I believe I’ve nearly killed my horse,” he added crustily.
There were those in the laager who witnessed this, and to whom the circumstances of the former acquaintanceship between the two men were known—but they tactfully refrained from making any comment. Percival West, however, was not so reticent.