sinister cast of countenance. "Shoot away, _'mlungu_!
But it will not be only a dog that will die."

The purport of this menace is unmistakable. The speaker even advances a
step, shifting, as he does so, his assegais from his right hand to his
left--leaving the former free to wield an ugly looking kerrie. His
fellow-countrymen seem equally ready for action.

Carhayes is beside himself with fury. To be defied and bearded like
this on his own land, and by four black scoundrels whom he has caught
red-handed in the act of killing his own game! The position is
intolerable. But through his well-nigh uncontrollable wrath there runs
a vein of caution.

Were he to act upon his first impulse and shoot the offending hound, he
would have but one charge left. The Kafirs would be upon him before he
could draw trigger. They evidently mean mischief, and they are four to
one. Two of them are armed with assegais and all four carry--in their
hands the scarcely less formidable weapon--the ordinary hard-wood
kerrie. Moreover, were he to come off victorious at the price of
shooting one of them dead, the act would entail very ugly consequences,
for although the frontier was practically in little short of a state of
war, it was not actually so, which meant that the civil law still held
sway and would certainly claim its vindication to the full.

For a moment or two the opposing parties stand confronting each other.
The white man, seated on his horse, grips the breech of his gun
convulsively, and the veins stand out in cords upon his flushed face as
he realises his utter powerlessness. The Kafirs, their naked, muscular
frames repulsive with red ochre, stand motionless, their savage
countenances wreathed in a sneer of hate and defiance. There are
scarcely ten yards between them.

The train is laid. It only needs the application of a spark to cause a
magnificent flare-up. That spark is applied by the tall barbarian who
has first spoken.

"_Au umlungu_!" he cries in his great, sneering tones. "Go away. We
have talked enough with you. Am I not Hlangani, a man of the House of
Sarili, the Great Chief, and is not the white dog mine? Go away.
_Suka_!" ["Get out." Usually only employed toward a dog.]

Now whether through pure accident--in other words, the "sheer
cussedness" of Fate--or whether it imagines that its master's last word
was a command to itself, the white dog at this juncture gets up, and
leaving the protecting sh