sucked back into the stream again.

For a few minutes thus he crouched, collecting his returning faculties--
and the first thing that came home to him was that he was in one of
those cavernlike inlets on the river bank similar to that in which his
struggle with Ziboza had taken place. Stay! Was it the same? He had a
confused recollection of being swept out into stream, but that might
have been an illusion. He peered around. The place was very dark but
it was not a cave. The overhanging of one side of the cleft, and the
interlacing of bushes and trees above, however, rendered it very like
one. But this fissure was much smaller than the one he had fallen into
with the Matabele chief, nor was it anything like as deep.

Had he been swept far down the river, he wondered? Then he decided such
could not have been the case, or he would have been drowned or knocked
to pieces among the driftwood, whereas here he was, practically
unharmed, only very exhausted. A thrill of exultation ran through his
dripping frame as he realised that he was uninjured. But it did not
last, for--he realised something further.

He realised that he was weaponless. His rifle had been shot from his
hand. He had lost his revolver in his fall, and even the sheath knife,
wherewith he had slain Ziboza, he had relaxed his grasp of at the moment
of being swept away. He was that most helpless animal of all--an
unarmed man.

He realised further that he was in the remotest and most unknown part of
little known Matabeleland, that he had formed one of a _retreating_
column, which was fighting its own way out, and which would have given
him up as dead long ago: that no further advance was likely to be made
in this direction for some time to come, and that meanwhile every human
being in the country was simply a ruthless and uncompromising foe. He
realised, too, that save for a few scraps of grimy biscuit, now soaked
to pulp in his jacket pocket, and plentifully spiced with tobacco dust,
he was without food--and entirely without means of procuring any--and
that he dared not leave his present shelter until nightfall, if then.
In sum he realised that at last, even he, Hilary Blachland, was in very
hard and desperate case indeed.

Were his enemies still searching for him, he wondered, or had they
concluded he had met his death in the raging waters of the flooded
river, as indeed it seemed to him little short of a miracle that he had
not? The rain was