Edala knew to what he was referring, and secretly writhed. The lash was stinging her too.
“Hy, darling—it’s a perfect godsend that you have come. Oh, we must do something,” she said, her eyes filling. Edala the light-hearted, the careless, the somewhat hard—had softened marvellously since that experience.
Then Prior came in, and Hyland greeted him cordially, for they had been great friends; in fact the magistrate’s clerk was one of the very few in the neighbourhood with whom he would exchange much more than a word, for the reasons given above. Now he gave him his experiences at Ndabakosi’s kraal, and subsequently.
“If I’d got off that horse I should have been a dead man,” he concluded. “So I should be if I hadn’t got my shirt out, and quilted that poor lame old crock rather sinfully. Well, you see—you can trust none of these chaps after all. If there’s one nigger in all Natal I should have sworn was straight it’s old Ndabakosi.”
So they talked on. Prior, by reason of his official position, and as the deputy of his absent chief, found himself in a sort of post of command—the detachment of Mounted Police, too, being under his orders, and it looked as if Hyland Thornhill by reason of a masterful force of will was going to share it with him, in the active line at any rate, if they came to blows with the rebels. Than this Prior asked nothing better and said so with unfeigned satisfaction.
We last saw Edala and her companion poised on the dizzy altitude of what the former called her ‘aerial throne,’ surrounded by peril. Moreover they had just been discovered. Manamandhla had seen them, as to that there could be no doubt. Every moment they had sat there expecting the return of those they had heard above—then death; and every such moment was bitter with the bitterness of death. Yet, when they climbed up nearly an hour later and stood, cramped and shivering, the summit of Sipazi was clear. Sorely was Edala puzzled. Clearly the Zulu had not betrayed their presence. What strange unfathomable motive could he have had in sparing their lives—hers especially, thought Edala, whose father had deliberately attempted to take his? Yet he had done so.
And in the result Prior was astounded to see at about mid-day, instead of his chief returning—for he had taken for granted the latter was spending the night at Thornhill’s—two tired and haggard-eyed girls walking up to the place; and more astounded still when he recognised their identity, and learned the strange doings they had to tell of.