For answer James Strong fired his revolver straight at Jack's head. I do not think he had intended from the beginning to murder us. Either he had calculated that his plans would work out without the need of killing us; or he had reflected that his own skin would be the safer, when in England, if he spared ours; for inquiries would certainly be set on foot if Henderson disappeared though few would know or care whether poor I disappeared or not.
But when Jack accused him of murdering Clutterbuck, his comrade—a crime which in all probability he had actually committed, though Jack only drew his bow at a venture—Strong changed his mind and suddenly determined that it would be the safer plan to shoot us both down. Accordingly, he first fired at Jack and missed him clean. Then he fired another shot and missed again, and swore, and turned his pistol on me and fired three shots at me; at the third I fell, feeling a sharp pain in my shin-bone—my leg would not support me.
Jack had drawn a log from the fire and was about to hurl it at Strong when he fired his last shot, at Jack this time, and rode away into the grey of the early morning, before the last named could launch his clumsy missile at him. The shooting of the six shots did not occupy altogether more than ten seconds.
Jack sprang to my side, white and terrified.
"For Heaven's sake, Peter, where are you hurt?" he gasped. "Can you speak? Are you dying? Where is the pain?"
"My leg," I said, writhing, for the pain was very severe. "It's only a broken leg—but it'll lose us the race!"
As a matter of fact, my leg was not broken, as the term is generally understood—there was no bone setting required; but the bullet had carried away a splinter of my shin-bone, having all but missed me, but taking, as it were, a little bite out of me as it passed.
Nevertheless, trivial as the wound was, this misfortune delayed us three weeks at Vryburg; for though Jack doctored me with all the devotion and skill that he could command, the weather was hot, and I suppose there were some wretched little bacilli about of the kind "to play old gooseberry with open wounds," as Jack learnedly expressed it; for my shin became very painful and inflamed before we reached Vryburg, and I was obliged to take to my bed at the hotel there and remain in it for a tantalising spell of three weeks.
As for our journey to Vryburg, I performed it in the waggon. Jack carried me, or half carried me, back to a village on the highroad which we had passed through on the previous evening without stopping, and there we awaited the arrival of the waggon, sleeping in a native hut and collecting, I suppose, the bacilli that were destined to play the part with my wound which Jack described as "old gooseberry." Had we stayed in that village on the previous evening we should have learned that a white man had been living in the place for a month, waiting for friends to come down from Bulawayo, and that he was living there still. This was, of course, our friend Strong, who had deliberately waited a month for us, in ambush, and had sallied after us when we passed through, and caught us napping, as described, over our camp fire.
But we learned another significant fact bearing upon this matter. When the white man originally came to the village a month ago, he was, we were told, accompanied by a friend who lived with him in a hut which the white men made for themselves. But after about a week the little white man disappeared, and the big white man explained that he had gone on to Cape Town, being tired of waiting.