t they
slackened not in their flight. The clinking flash of the horse-hoofs
rasped the stony way, but the yelling of the pursuers had died away
completely. Still it would not do to slacken their efforts.

Suddenly Renshaw running alongside stumbled, then staggered a few yards
and sank to the ground. A curious numbed feeling had come into his
legs. They had literally given way beneath him. As he tried to rise,
he was conscious of feeling half paralysed.

"Come along, man!" cried the other, impatiently. "Why, what's the row?"

"This!" he said, slowly, pointing to a small puncture in his boot just
on the instep. "I felt the sting when you first came to grief. I've
been pinked by a poisoned arrow."

The place was a wild one, shut in between lofty cliffs, gloomy now with
the falling shadows of night. Renshaw knew that he would never leave it
alive.

"Good-bye, Sellon," he said, the stupor deepening upon him even as he
spoke. "Don't bother any more about me. You're on the right track now,
and must find your way as best you can. Go on and leave me."

"Nonsense, old chap--make an effort, and try what you can do."

But Renshaw shook his head. "No," he said. "I cannot even get up. You
must take care of yourself now. Go on and leave me."

Sellon looked at him for a moment without a word. Then he--went on.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR.

LEFT TO DIE.

The glooming shadows of night crept on apace.

Renshaw, lying there in the wild rocky defile, felt the poison stealing
insidiously through his veins in a kind of slow drowsy stupor. He knew
that he was doomed; he realised that even if the wild Korannas did not
speedily come up and put an end to his sufferings yet his hour had come.
The poison was too deadly for antidote, and he had no antidote.

In his stupor he hardly heard the receding hoof-strokes of his
companion--his companion for whose life he had given his own, and who
now rode away leaving him alone in that remote and savage solitude to
die.

He lay there as he had sunk down. The night grew pitchy black between
those grim, frowning walls of cliff. The faint stir of a cool breeze
played in fitful puffs about his pallid brow already cold and moist with
the dews of approaching death. The stars flashed from the vault above
in a narrow riband of gold between the loom of the great cliffs against
the sky. The melancholy howl of some prowling beast rose now and again
upon the night.

There was a pat