nd learnt which was
softest--his head or a knobkerrie. We mended him up, but it took a
little while."

"Poor chap. Is he all right now?"

"Oh yes." And the other two, hearing them, turned and waited.

During the greetings which followed a mere glance was sufficient to make
Denham acquainted with two things--one, that the newcomer was over head
and ears in love with Verna Halse, and the other that Verna was not in
the least in love with him. She greeted him with frank, open-hearted
friendliness, while his face, in that brief moment, spoke volumes.

Then the two men were introduced, and Denham became alive to the fact
that the other regarded him with no friendly eyes.

"Poor boy," he thought to himself. "He is handsome, too, very, in the
Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed style, manly-looking as well. I wonder why he
has no show."

As the evening wore on this subtle antagonism deepened, at any rate such
was obvious to the object thereof. Yet Denham laid himself out to be
friendly. He made no attempt to monopolise Verna's society, but spent
most of the time chatting and smoking with her father, leaving the other
a clear field so far as he himself was concerned. And of this the other
had laid himself out to make the most; as why should he not, since he
had ridden a two days' journey with that express object?

Once, when the conversation was general, and turning on the probability
of a general rising, the subject of the state of native feeling in the
Makanya district came up; Verna said, "Mr Denham came right through the
Makanya bush all alone."

But it happened that several people were talking at once, as is not
unfrequently the case when a topic of public interest is under
discussion, and the remark was lost. Verna did not repeat it. Some
strange, unaccountable instinct kept her from doing so. It could be
nothing else but instinct, for certainly Denham himself gave no sign of
having so much as heard it. But the time was to come when she should
look back on that instinct with very real meaning indeed.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

TREACHERY.

The Lumisana forest covers many square miles of country, and that the
roughest and most impenetrable country imaginable. Huge tree-trunks,
dense undergrowth, impenetrable thickets of _haak doorn_, that awful
fishhook-like thorn which, like the sword of the Edenic angel, turns
every way, and growing in such close abattis that any one trying to
force his way through it would in a