“Weep not, my husband,” she said, “I have been all too ill a wife to you. Do not mourn for me, yet remember that I loved you well.” And again she was silent for a long space.
Then she spoke and for the last time of all, and her voice came in a gasping whisper through the hole in the rock:—
“Farewell, Umslopogaas, my husband and my brother, I thank you for your love, Umslopogaas. Ah! I die!”
Umslopogaas could make no answer, only he watched the little hand he held. Twice it opened, twice it closed upon his own, then it opened for the third time, turned grey, quivered, and was still forever!
Now it was at the hour of dawn that Nada died.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE VENGEANCE OF MOPO AND HIS FOSTERLING
It chanced that on this day of Nada’s death and at that same hour of dawn I, Mopo, came from my mission back to the kraal of the People of the Axe, having succeeded in my end, for that great chief whom I had gone out to visit had hearkened to my words. As the light broke I reached the town, and lo! it was a blackness and a desolation.
“Here is the footmark of Dingaan,” I said to myself, and walked to and fro, groaning heavily. Presently I found a knot of men who were of the people that had escaped the slaughter, hiding in the mealie-fields lest the Slayers should return, and from them I drew the story. I listened in silence, for, my father, I was grown old in misfortune; then I asked where were the Slayers of the king? They replied that they did not know; the soldiers had gone up the Ghost Mountain after the Wolf-Brethren and Nada the Lily, and from the forest had come a howling of beasts and sounds of war; then there was silence, and none had been seen to return from the mountain, only all day long the vultures hung over it.
“Let us go up the mountain,” I said.
At first they feared, because of the evil name of the place; but in the end they came with me, and we followed on the path of the impi of the Slayers and guessed all that had befallen it. At length we reached the knees of stone, and saw the place of the great fight of the Wolf-Brethren. All those who had taken part in that fight were now but bones, because the vultures had picked them every one, except Galazi, for on the breast of Galazi lay the old wolf Deathgrip, that was yet alive. I drew near the body, and the great wolf struggled to his feet and ran at me with bristling hair and open jaws, from which no sound came. Then, being spent, he rolled over dead.