f
had witnessed, was sufficient to remind him. Moreover, even while thus
balancing probabilities, certain scraps of smothered conversation
reached his ears. That decided him. He would not place himself within
their power. It only remained to sell his life dearly.

If only it were near the close of the day, he could hold them off for a
while, and perhaps, under cover of darkness, escape. But it was hardly
yet full noon. They could get round him and rake him with a cross fire.
Bad marksmen as they were, they could hardly go on missing him all day.

"Come then, Isipau!" called out Ziboza. "Lay down thy weapons and
come."

"No. Go ye now away and leave me. Peace is not far distant and many
good words will I speak for you because of this day."

A jeering roar, now of rage, now of disappointment, greeted his words.
At the same time Blachland sighted one of them kneeling down with his
piece levelled, and taking deliberate aim at him. An instinct moved him
to drop down behind the stone, and the instinct was a true one, for as
he did so a bullet sang through the spot where his head and shoulders
had been but a fraction of a second before. Two others hummed over him,
but high.

He put his hat up above the stone, holding it by the brim. "Whigge!"--
another bullet hummed by, almost grazing it.

"Some devil there can shoot, anyway," he growled to himself. "If only I
could get a glint of him. Ah!"

A stratagem had occurred to him. He managed to fix the hat just so that
the top of it should project, then creeping to the edge of the boulder,
he peered round, his piece sighted and ready. Just as he thought. The
head and shoulders of a savage, taking aim at the hat--and then with the
crash of his own rifle that savage was spinning round and turning a
convulsive somersault, shot fair and square through the head. His
slayer set his teeth, with a growl that was half exulting, half a curse.
His foes were going to find that they had cornered a lion indeed--so
much he could promise them.

The mutterings of wrath and dismay which arose among them over this neat
shot, were drowned in a furious volley. Every man who possessed a
firearm seemed animated with a kind of frenzied desire to discharge it
as quickly and as often as possible at and around the rock behind which
he lay. For a few moments the position was very sultry indeed. It
might have been worse but that the moral of that deadly shot rendered
his assailants