posts extending along what was then the Kafir
frontier, but after a series of long and harassing wars, resulting in
the removal of those troublesome neighbours further eastward, Fort
Lamport, in common with other military posts, was abandoned as such. A
town, however, had sprung up around it, and this, as a centre of
commerce, and also of native trade--for there were still large native
locations in the surrounding district--throve apace.

It was not much of a place to look at; and in its main features differed
little, if at all, from any other up-country township. The houses,
mostly one-storied, were all squat and ugly. There were half a dozen
churches and chapels, also squat and ugly. There were several hotels,
and four or five native canteens. There were the public offices and
gaol, these being the old fort buildings, converted to that use. There
were the usual half-dozen streets--long, straggling, and very dusty--and
the usual market square, also very dusty; the average number of general
stores--dealing in anything, from a pianoforte to a pot of blacking--and
the average number of waggons and spans of oxen standing half the day in
front of them. As for the good citizens--well, of course, they
considered their town the foremost in the Colony, and, on the whole,
were not much more given to strife and litigation among themselves than
the inhabitants of a small community generally are.

But if the town itself was unattractive, its environment was not, with
its background of rounded hills, their slopes covered with dense forest,
while above and beyond rose the higher peaks of the Umtirara range.

In the smoking-room of one of the hotels above mentioned lounged Renshaw
Fanning. It was the hot and drowsy hour immediately succeeding
luncheon, and he was nodding over the _Fort Lamport Courier_, a typical
sheet, which managed to supply news to its constituent world a week or
so after the said news had become public property through other mediums.

Small wonder, then, that Renshaw felt drowsy, and that the paper should
slip from his relaxing grasp. Instinctively he made a clutch at it, and
the action roused him. His eye fell upon a paragraph which he had
overlooked--

"Horrible Murder by Escaped Convicts."

With the fascination which a sensational subject never altogether fails
to inspire, drowsy as he felt, he ran his eye down the paragraph.

"No less than seven desperadoes succeeded in making their escape fr