birds with one stone, so to speak, by allowing
the formidable strangers to go their way and inflict the maximum amount
of annoyance and damage upon his especial enemies before those enemies
in their turn destroyed the unwelcome visitors.

Thus it came to pass that, after spending close upon a fortnight in
momentary expectation of a hideously protracted death by torture, Dick
Maitland and Philip Grosvenor one day found themselves most unexpectedly
released, their belongings returned to them, and permission accorded
them to proceed upon their journey as soon as they would. They
instantly availed themselves of this permission, lest peradventure it
should be retracted; the result being that for five days they travelled
under the protection of an armed escort until they arrived at the
frontier, where the escort hurriedly left them, after jeeringly warning
them of the many evil things that awaited them in the immediate future.

Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed after the departure of the guard before
the travellers perceived a man intently watching them from the summit of
a low kopje about a quarter of a mile ahead of them. For perhaps a
minute he stood, motionless as a statue, gazing steadfastly at them
under the shade of his hand, then he turned suddenly and disappeared.
But during that minute Dick and Grosvenor had brought their powerful
field glasses to bear upon him, and had distinctly seen that his skin
was white, excepting in so far as it had become browned by the sun, that
his hair was thick, black, and arranged in long, straight curls that
reached to his shoulders, that he was naked save for a breech clout
about his loins and a pair of sandals upon his feet, and that he was
armed with a long, slender spear and a circular shield or target about
two and a half feet in diameter. Three minutes later they saw him
running with incredible speed toward another low elevation, distant
about a mile from his starting-point, and which, as the travellers
discovered, when they brought their glasses to bear upon it, was crowned
by a low structure, so roughly constructed that it might easily have
passed for a mere heap of stones and turf, but which, later on, proved
to be a sort of blockhouse accommodating an outpost consisting of an
officer and ten men. Two minutes later the man whom they had first
seen, or another so exceedingly like him that it was impossible to
distinguish any difference at a distance of two or three hundred y