to our own camp to rest
and await the dawn before taking up the trail, only to find ourselves
confronted with a new trouble. All the Strathmuir half-breeds whom we
had left behind as useless, had taken advantage of our absence and that
of the Zulus, to desert. They had just bolted back upon our tracks and
vanished into the sea of bush. What became of them I do not know, as we
never saw them again, but my belief is that these cowardly fellows all
perished, for certainly not one of them reached Strathmuir.

Fortunately for us, however, they departed in such a hurry that they
left all their loads behind them, and even some of the guns they
carried. Evidently Janee's yell was the last straw which broke the back
of such nerve as remained to them. Doubtless they believed it to be the
signal of attack by hordes of cannibals.

As there was nothing to said or done, since any pursuit of these curs
was out of the question, we made the best of things as they were. It
proved a simple business. From the loads we selected such articles as
were essential, ammunition for the most part, to carry ourselves--and
the rest we abandoned, hiding it under a pile of stones in case we
should ever come that way again.

The guns they had thrown aside we distributed among the Zulus who had
none, though the thought that they possessed them, so far as I was
concerned, added another terror to life. The prospect of going into
battle with those wild axemen letting off bullets in every direction was
not pleasant, but fortunately when that crisis came, they cast them away
and reverted to the weapons to which they were accustomed.

Now all this sounds much like a tale of disaster, or at any rate of
failure. It is, however, wonderful by what strange ways good results
are brought about, so much so that at times I think that these seeming
accidents must be arranged by an Intelligence superior to our own, to
fulfil through us purposes of which we know nothing, and frequently,
be it admitted, of a nature sufficiently obscure. Of course this is a
fatalistic doctrine, but then, as I have said before, within certain
limits I am a fatalist.

To take the present case, for instance, the whole Inez episode at first
sight might appear to be an excrescence on my narrative, of which the
object is to describe how I met a certain very wonderful woman and what
I heard and experienced in her company. Yet it is not really so, since
had it not been for the Inez adventure,