een carried off alive and perhaps unhurt
by the savages. Poor child! Poor darling little Nell! Oh, if I were
right in my reading of the signs, what an unspeakably awful fate was
hers! And yet--and yet--perhaps it might not be so very terrible after
all. She was but a child--and a sweetly pretty child, too; and I had
heard of cases where white girl children had been kidnapped by the
blacks and carried off by them to their fastnesses in the wilds, there
to become, first the pet, and ultimately the 'nkosikaas or chieftainess
of the tribe. True, it was not often that that was done, but there was
a kind of legend among the natives that somewhere far up in the interior
there was a great and very powerful tribe ruled over by a white
'nkosikaas; while within my own recollection a young girl, the daughter
of a Boer farmer, had been carried off by the Bechuanas, and was in like
manner said to be still living as the 'nkosikaas of the tribe. If this
were true--and there seemed to be no good reason to doubt it--one could
only hope that poor little Nell Lestrange might meet with no worse a
fate.

But it was a horrible thing to think of that sweet, lovable little
creature being suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep in the middle of
the night by a horde of ferocious, bloodthirsty savages, and carried off
by them, perhaps in ignorance of her father's fate, and in deadly terror
of what was to befall her. I was very fond of Nell--I had grown to
regard her almost as a sister; and my first impulse was to set out there
and then, seek her until I found her, and never rest until I had
effected her rescue from her savage jailers. But a few moments'
reflection sufficed to convince me of the utter futility of such a mad
project. These two outrages--the attacks upon Lestrange's and our own
farms--clearly indicated that the long-expected rising of the natives
had at last taken place, so suddenly that Lestrange at least had been
caught unawares, and no doubt the whole country was at that moment
ablaze and being overrun by the blacks in overwhelming numbers. The
mystery to me was that I had not heard so much as a hint of the actual
rising from any of the folk whom I had met on my return journey from
Port Elizabeth; and the fact that I had not done so seemed to indicate
that the outbreak, although in a general way expected, had been so
skilfully managed that, after all, the settlers had been caught more or
less off their guard. And, so fa