succulent feast they would
have when the darkness of night should enable them to fetch it away to
the huts from this remote and unsuspected hiding-place. One was clad in
a pair of greasy moleskin trousers, hitched up to his shoulders by a
pair of filthy braces, largely repaired with string; the other was clad
in nothing at all, unless a string of blue beads round his neck counted
for anything. In the trouser-wearing savage Wyvern recognised one of
his own herds, whose absence from the flock under his charge had led to
the present discovery. The other, a tall, powerful, desperate-looking
scoundrel with a deeply pock-marked countenance, he did not recognise at
all.

It was all very well to have caught them red-handed, but the question
was, what course to pursue. They were two to one, hard, wiry savages at
that. They had sheath knives and he was unarmed; for a pocket-knife is
of little or no use as a defensive weapon in that it is bound to shut on
the hand of the wielder. They were engaged in an act the penalty of
which spelt lashes and fine, or, at best a year's hard labour; was it
likely they would submit meekly to capture? And then, as there flitted
through his mind a recent instance of a stock fanner being
unhesitatingly murdered under precisely similar circumstances, Wyvern
began to realise that his own position was one of some little danger.
Would it not be wiser to withdraw now, and take steps for trapping the
culprits when he should have more force at his disposal? Decidedly here
was food for reflection.

But the matter was taken out of his hands by one of those unforeseen
trifles upon which so much may turn. In his eagerness to watch the
proceedings just below he had let one hand come into contact with the
leaf of a prickly pear, which sprouted interwoven with the bushes
through which he was peering. Now contact with an ordinary thorn would
not have moved him, but contact with these innumerable and microscopic
stings, as it were, which once in the skin are bound to leave painful
recollection of that fact even for weeks, inspired a sort of instinctive
horror that had made him start. Even before the stone which he had
dislodged beneath his foot had begun to roll into the _donga_ the two
miscreants looked up quickly and saw him.

The startled ejaculation which escaped them, gave way to a rapid murmur.
Wyvern caught but one word and that was sufficient. He knew that he
was about to fight for his life--a