ering on the buckets, doubtless not without some
intention to jeer at and flout the baffled baboons, who
watched them in such a silence. It was drooping now to the
pit of night, and things were barely seen as shapes, when
from higher up the line, where the guardians of the crops
were sparser, there came a discord of shrieks.

"'The baboons are through the line,' they cried, and it was
on that instant that the great watching army of apes came
leaping in a charge on the main force of the Kafirs. Oh,
but that was a wild, a haunting thing! Great bull-headed
dog-baboons, with naked fangs and clutching hands alert for
murder; bounding mothers of squealing litters that led
their young in a dash to the fight; terrible lean old
bitches that made for the men when others went for the
corn,--they swooped like a flood of horror on the aghast
Kafirs, biting, tearing, bounding through the air like
uncouth birds, and in one second the throng of the Kafirs
melted before them, and they were among the corn.

"Eight men they killed by rending, and of the others, some
sixty, there was not one but had his wound--some bite to the
bone, some gash, where iron fingers had clutched and torn
their way through skin and flesh. When they came to
Shadrach, and woke him wearily with the breathless timidity
of beaten men, it was already too late to go with a gun to
the corn-lands. The baboons had contented themselves with
small plunder after their victory, and withdrew orderly to
the hills; and even as Shadrach came to the door of the
homestead, he saw the last of their marshaled line, black
against the sky, moving swiftly towards the kloofs.

"He flung out his hands like a man in despair, with never a
word to ease his heart, and then the old Shangaan Kafir
stood up before him. He had the upper part of his right arm
bitten to the bone and worried, and now he cast back the
blanket from his shoulder and held out the quivering wound
to his master.

"'It was the chief of the baboons that gave me this,' he
said, 'and he is a baboon only in the night. He came
through the ranks of them bounding like a boulder on a
steep hillside, and it was for me that his teeth were
bared. So when he hung by his teeth to my arm and tore and
snarled, I drew my nails across his back, that the baas
should know the truth.'

"'What is this madness?' cried Shadrach.

"'No madness, but simple devilry,' answered the Shangaan,
and there came a murmur of support from the K