“The beggars are off now, and no mistake!” cried Tom. “Let us see what damage they have done us.”
“First and foremost there are two mules killed,” responded his father; “Sandboy and Admiral—the best animals in either team.”
“And Kicking Jan’s got an ugly wound in his flank,” put in Keown. “Bad cess to the contrary baste; he’s sure to git into mischief if there’s mischief about!”
“I got hurt too,” said Black William with a grin, showing a tear in his sleeve, which was covered with blood. “And dere’s young Mas’r George been hit by dem niggers!”
An assegai had indeed grazed George Weston’s shoulder, but happily no serious injury had been done to any of the party—nothing, in fact, that cold water and a strip of lint would not cure.
The dead mules were now stripped of their harness; Kicking Jan’s wound was dressed—an operation that the “contrary baste,” true to his nature, resented to the best of his power; and the travellers resumed their journey. No sooner were they well on the move, and at a respectable distance from their late encampment, than the discomfited savages once more appeared on the scene, and fell tooth and nail on the carcasses of the slain mules.
“Bedad!” exclaimed the ex-sergeant when he saw the blacks cutting and hacking away with their short assegais, “they’ll be having a foine gorge now! Sorra a bit of flesh will they lave on the bones of poor Sandboy and Admiral.”
“They have paid dearly for their feast,” observed Mr Weston, who was seated beside him. “Are all the Caffres such gluttons?”
“Indade they are, sorr,” was the reply. “Just sit the best of them down before a dead animal of any sort, from an elephant to a dossie, and they’d go on eatin’ till they were fit to bust.”
Deprived of the two best mules in the teams, and having a third partially disabled, the travellers did not get so quickly over the ground as they had hitherto done, and it was some time after dusk before they arrived at Ryk’s Drift. Here they were entertained by the German missionary, and on the following morning they started on the final stage but one of their journey.