rary to
my orders."

"Contrary to your orders? But,"--sitting up, with a stare of blank
amazement--"but--who are you?"

"I am Umlimo."

"What! _You_ Umlimo? It cannot be. I have always held Umlimo to be a
sort of fraudulent abstraction, engineered by innyangas like Shiminya
and others. _You_ the Umlimo?"

But to the startled eyes of the questioner the form of the questioned
seemed to grow larger, taller, like a presence filling the whole place.
The old relentless look of implacable hate transformed the features, and
the deep eyes glowed, while from the scarcely opened lips boomed forth
as in deep thunder-tones--

"I am Umlimo."

A mist filled the place. The figure with its background of rock-wall
seemed to lose form. A sudden stupor seized upon the brain of John
Ames, as though the whole atmosphere were pervaded by a strong narcotic.
Then he knew no more.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

IN STATE OF SIEGE.

There can be no doubt but that, during the period of the rising, and
especially during the earlier half of the same, the township of Bulawayo
was a very uncomfortable place indeed.

The oft-recurring scares, necessitating the crowding of, at any rate,
the bulk of its inhabitants into the laagers at night, contributed in
the main to this. With instances of the fell unsparing ferocity which
attended the rebel stroke--sudden, swift, and unexpected--fresh in the
mind of everybody, citizens were chary of exposing themselves and their
families to a like visitation. Private residences straggling over the
surburban stands were abandoned for the greater security of the
temporary forts which had been hastily but effectively formed out of
some of the principal buildings in and around the township itself; and
the comfort and privacy of home-life had perforce to be exchanged for an
overcrowded, hotch-potch, barrack sort of existence; men, women, and
children of all sorts and sizes herding together, hugger-mugged, under
every conceivable form of racket and discomfort, and under the most
inadequate conditions of area and convenience. Rumour, in its
many-tongued and wildest form, filled the air, gathering in volume, and
frequently in wildness, with the advent of every fresh batch of
refugees. For from all sides these came flying in--prospectors, miners,
outlying settlers with their families, some with a portion of their
worldly goods, others with none at all, and fortunate in having escaped
with their lives where