“Yes, Jeremy, but I should have died with them; it was my duty to die. And I do not care about living, and they did. I have been an unfortunate dog all my life. I shot my cousin, I lost Eva, and now I have seen all my comrades killed, and I, who was their leader, alone escaped, and perhaps I have not done with my misfortunes yet. What next, I wonder? what next?”
Ernest’s distress was so acute, that Jeremy, looking at him and seeing that all he had gone through had been too much for him, tried to soothe him, lest he should go into hysterics, by putting his arm round his waist and giving him a good hug.
“Look here, old chap,” he said; “it is no use bothering one’s head about these things. We are just so many feathers blown about by the wind, and must float where the wind blows us. Sometimes it is a good wind, and sometimes a bad one; but on the whole it is bad, and we must just make the best of it, and wait till it doesn’t think it worth while to blow our particular feathers about any more, and then we shall come to the ground, and not till then. And now we have been up here for more than five minutes, and given the horses a bit of a rest. We must be pushing on if we want to get to Helpmakaar before dark, and I only hope we shall get there before the Zulus, that’s all. By Jove, here comes the storm—come on!” And Jeremy jumped off the lump of iron-ore, and began to descend the koppie.
Ernest, who had been listening with his face in his hands, rose and followed him in silence. As he did so, a breath of ice-cold air from the storm-cloud, which was now right over-head, fanned his hot brow, and when he had gone a few yards he turned to meet it, and to cast one more look at the scene.
It was the last earthly landscape he ever saw. For at that instant there leaped from the cloud overhead a fierce stream of jagged light, which struck the mass of iron-ore on which they had been seated, shivered and fused it, and then ran down the side of the hill to the plain. Together with the lightning there came an ear-splitting crack of thunder.
Jeremy, who was now nearly at the bottom of the little hill, staggered at the shock. When he recovered, he looked up where Ernest had been standing, and could not see him. He rushed up the hill again, calling him in accents of frantic grief. There was no answer. Presently he found him lying on the ground, white and still.
“He found him lying on the ground, white and still.”