,
ensconced in a cleft which commanded the hollow beneath, Harley Greenoak
sat coolly refilling the magazine of a Winchester repeating rifle, while
an old elephant gun of enormous calibre lay on the ground beside him.

"You're well out of that," he said, hardly looking up. "Lucky I got
back to camp when I did, and John Voss came in at the same time with the
notion he had picked up that Pahlandhle's crowd were particularly on the
look-out for express-riders. I formed my plan there and then; borrowed
Mainwaring's Winchester--dashed bad shooting-gun it is too--and, with
John Voss's old elephant _roer_ to give the idea of artillery, why--
brought the whole thing off. Even then the mist counted for something."

In the last-named both now recognised one of the smartest native
detectives attached to the F.A.M. Police.

"Come along," went on Greenoak, rising. "We must get on with those
despatches. No time to lose."

"But--they are lost," said Sandgate, wearily.

"No, they ain't. John's got 'em."

The black man grinned as he handed the paper over to the corporal.

"But our horses?" said Dick Selmes, dismayed.

"Well, I got back one of them," answered Greenoak, equably. "One of you
can ride John's--he's quite able to make his way back to the Kangala
alone. So there are mounts for the three of us, and the sooner we get
on to the Isiwa fort the better.

"Well, Dick," he went on, "I take it you've found your first experience
of express-riding `thunderingly exciting,' as you were saying the other
day."

"I should think so--ugh!" And something like a shudder accompanied the
words, as the speaker recalled their recent ghastly experience, and the
lamentable fate of the unfortunate man whose body lay just beneath, and
which they could not even spare the time to bury.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

THE AMMUNITION ESCORT.

"Where did you pick up that man, Jacob Snyman?" said Harley Greenoak.

"He's not been long attached to the Force," answered Sub-Inspector
Ladell.

"Yes, I know, but _where_ did you pick him up?"

"That's more than I can tell you. He's rather a pet of the
Commandant's; helps him to find new sorts of butterflies and creeping
things that the old man is dead nuts on collecting. So he took him on
in the native detective line."

Harley Greenoak did not reply, but his thoughts took this very definite
shape--

"That's all very well, but a taste for entomology on the part of an
untrousered savage isn't