rget of him could not go on missing him all day. Indeed
it was marvellous that he should have missed so easy a mark at all.

Again the superstition concerning the opal recurred to him. No sooner
had he found the stone than he found himself in grave danger. Every
moment now he expected another bullet. He would almost certainly never
live to realise the bright fair future he had just been mapping out.
Well, the brutal cowardly ruffian who had come out there to do him to
death in the dark as it were, should not benefit by the clue he himself
had discovered, and to this end, concealed by the rock, he scraped a
hole in the soil and deposited the stone within it. Then he called
out:--

"Rawson, you cowardly skulker. Haven't you the pluck to meet me man to
man? Come out and show yourself, can't you?"

There was no reply.

"Oh, you're plucky enough at thrashing defenceless women, and boys not a
third of your size," went on Wyvern. "Come out now and we'll fight fair
with anything you like. Come out, funk-stick."

This time an answer came, or some sort of an answer, and it took the
form of quick muttered voices in the Zulu tongue, together with the
sound of a scuffle, and a clinking fall of small stones down the face of
the krantz. Then a voice was raised--also in the Zulu tongue.

"Come up here, _Nkose_. Come up here. I have him fast."

And Wyvern knew the voice for that of Mtezani, the young Zulu whose life
they had saved, and he went.

But before he went he scraped up the opal which he had buried beneath
the loose soil.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

OF THE HOSTILE USUTUS.

Wyvern had no difficulty in making his way up to the spot whence the
shot had been fired, and arriving there an unexpected sight met his
eyes. There, sure enough, was Mtezani, and in his hand he held a big,
wicked-looking assegai, upraised and in striking attitude, while beneath
him, face to the earth, he seated astride upon it, lay the body of a
man, another native. Beside them both lay a rifle.

"Lie still, dog," warned the young Zulu. "Lie still, and move not, else
my broad blade shall pin thee to the earth. _Nkose_! Here is he who
would have shot you. Look at him."

Wyvern did so, and could not but feel some astonishment, for he
recognised in his would-be murderer the boy whom Bully Rawson had so
mercilessly thrashed on the first occasion of his visiting that worthy's
kraal, Pakisa.

"Here he is," went on the chief's son