ere, barely twenty yards distant, which skipped
hither and thither, champing their great tusks and barking savagely.
One old male of enormous size, outlined against the sky, on the apex of
a cone, looked as large as a lion. Others came swarming down the rocks;
evil-looking horrors, repulsive as so many gigantic spiders.

Wild-eyed with fear, Nidia snatched up a blanket, and ran towards them,
waving it, and shouting. They retreated helter-skelter, but only to
skip forward again, mowing and gibbering. Three of the foremost,
indeed, great males, would hardly move at all. They squatted almost
within springing distance, gnashing their tusks, hideously threatening.

Then, as by magic, the whole gnome-like troop wildly fled; but the cause
of this change of front was hard and material. "Whizz--Bang--Whack!"
came a succession of stones, forcibly hurled, splintering off a rock
like a bullet, thudding hard upon simian ribs. Yelling and jabbering,
the whole crew skipped and shoggled up the rocks, and Nidia, with a very
wan and scared smile upon her pallid face, turned to welcome her
companion and protector--turned, to behold--not John Ames at all, but a
burly savage--a tall Matabele warrior, barbarously picturesque in the
weird panoply of his martial adornments.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

TRAPPED.

His mind aglow with the recollection of that farewell, his one thought
how soon he should be able to return, John Ames strode forth upon his
quest, and as he did so it is probable that the whole world could not
have produced another human being filled with such a rapturous
exaltation as this refugee from a fiendish massacre, hiding for his life
in the grim fastnesses of the Matopo Hills.

That last look he had discerned in Nidia's eyes, that last pressure of
her hands, could mean but one thing, and that the one thing to obtain
which he would have laid down his life again and again. She was
beginning to care for him. Other little spontaneous acts of cordiality
during their enforced exile, had more than once stirred within him this
wild hope, yet he had not encouraged himself to entertain it. Such he
had of course deemed to be the outcome of their position. Now, however,
the scales seemed to fall from his eyes, and he could read into them a
very different meaning.

These last few days! Why, they seemed a lifetime. And when they should
be over--what then? Was not his resolution a quixotic one; now, indeed,
an impossible