"Have done, brothers!" cried Mtezani at last. "I think we have done
better than running down and killing one white man and he unarmed. Now
we will take off the skin and return with it; and I think my father will
no longer say I am still a boy, and unfit to put on the head-ring."

They agreed, and in high good-humour all turned to to flay the great
beast. None had any idea as to the part Mtezani had borne in the escape
of the said white man, or of his motive in joining in the pursuit.
Further, it is even possible that if they had, his last feat would have
gone far in their eyes to justify it or, indeed, anything which he chose
to do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wyvern awoke to consciousness in the pitch dark. His confused senses at
first failed to convey any clear idea of what had happened; indeed the
first shape his thoughts took was that he had been killed, and buried.
The damp, earthy smell around him must be of course that of the grave,
and yet he had suffered little or no pain. How had he been killed?
Then suddenly and with a rush all came back--the lion-cubs and the
snarl, his own fall, and the tumult overhead. He was not dead then, and
now an intense joy took possession of him. All was not yet lost, no,
not by any means. It must have been hours since he had fallen in there,
and now, listening intently, he heard no sound outside. The Zulus must
have given up the pursuit His fall into the covered-in _donga_ had been
the saving of him. Clearly the lioness had attacked the pursuing
warriors and had either been slain by them or had delayed their advance
to such an extent that they had not deemed it worth while to continue
the pursuit; and here the strangeness of the repetition of incidents
suggested itself. On a former occasion he had been spared the necessity
of combating a formidable enemy in an unarmed state by the intervention
of a snake, now the same thing had happened through the intervention of
a lion.

And now the next thing was to get out of his friendly prison. Looking
upward, the overhanging boughs and bush were faintly pierced by threads
of golden moonlight; and he blessed that light for would it not make his
way plain once up above? He guessed that the _donga_ was of the same
nature as the one at Seven Kloofs although here there was no river for
it to open into, and to that end he slowly began to make his way
downward. No easy matter was i