in upon the lion, and with all her force drove home the blade deep
into its ribs.

The wound was not a mortal one--at the moment--and the enraged brute
turned instantly at Nakeesa, struck her to earth, and then fastened his
teeth, with a hideous, crunching sound, deep in the bones of her neck.
For a good half minute it continued this deadly work, then, noticing the
year-old child, crying in the back of the woman's cloak, it gripped that
also between its teeth, and put an end to it. Meanwhile Kwaneet, almost
uninjured by the lion's first rush, had crawled away unnoticed, and,
with Nakeesa's elder lad, regained a place of safety.

So Nakeesa lay there dead by the river, her days of toil and of pleasure
all ended. She had shown two great extremes of evil and good in her
nineteen years of existence. She had refused to save the life of
Sinikwe (the man who treated her ill, and whom she loathed) from the
puff-adder--an act as good as murder, most men will say. And for
Kwaneet, who had treated her with some kindliness, and whom she loved
with as much love as a Masarwa is capable of, she had given her whole
being--life itself. She could do no more.

As for Kwaneet, having satisfied himself, without much emotion, at a
later period of the day, of the death of his wife and child, and having
taken as much zebra meat as the lion had left, he went his way.
Nakeesa's elder child--now three years old--was, of course, a perfectly
useless encumbrance to him. He therefore sold the boy to some Batauana
people for a new assegai, and soon after returned to his desert life.

Nakeesa's bones are long since scattered, broken, and devoured by the
beasts of the desert; but her skull, a little, round, smooth skull, lies
there, yellow and discoloured, in the far swamps of the Tamalakan river.
Her poor, squalid, desert love-story can scarcely be said to point a
moral, or even adorn a tale. It merely affords one more instance of the
complex nature of the human heart--of human emotions--even in the
crudest and most savage aspect of African life.

CHAPTER THREE.

A DESERT MYSTERY.

One of the cheeriest of Christmas Days was that spent on the pleasant
banks of the Limpopo River, not many years since. Two hunting friends
were trekking through Bechuanaland towards the Zambesi, and it happened
by great good fortune that, just at the junction of the Notwani and
Limpopo Rivers, they found outspanned the wagons of two hunters and
traders s