g his chances so far as to make one
more effort to save his life, to strive to gain some other place of
concealment before the whole horde came up?

But just then a sound reached his ear--a faint, stealthy rasping. The
Koranna was already climbing up to the ledge.

The mysterious shuffling continued. A stone, loosened by the climber,
fell clattering down the rocks. Then there was silence once more--and--

A wrinkled, parchment-hued countenance reared itself up, peering round
the elbow of the cliff. The yellow eyes stared with a wild beast-like
gleam, the black wool and protruding ears looking fiend-like in the
falling darkness. His hour had come. Momentarily he expected to
receive the fatal shaft.

But it came not. After the head followed the squat, ungainly body,
standing upright upon the ledge, the sinewy, ape-like hand grasping its
primitive, but fatal, armament--the bow and arrows and the spear. But
the bow was not bent, no arrow was fitted to the string.

"_Allamaghtaag! Myn lieve Baas_!" ["Almighty! My dear master!"]

Renshaw sat upright and stared at the speaker, and well he might. Was
he dreaming? The old familiar Dutch colloquialism--the voice!

The squalid, forbidding-looking savage advanced, his puckered face
transformed with concern. Renshaw stared, and stared again. And then
he recognised the familiar, if unprepossessing lineaments of his
defaulting retainer--old Dirk.

The old Koranna rushed forward and knelt down at his master's side,
pouring forth a voluble torrent of questions in the Boer dialect. How
had he come there? Where was he wounded? Who had dared to attack him?
Those _schelm Bosjesmenschen_ [Rascally Bushmen]! He would declare war
against the whole race of them. He would shoot them all. And so on,
and so on. But amid all his chatter the faithful old fellow, having
discovered where the wound was, had promptly ripped off Renshaw's boot.

Yes, there it was--the poisoned puncture of the Bushman arrow--livid and
swollen. For a moment Dirk contemplated it. Then he bent down and
examined it more attentively, probing it gingerly with his finger. The
result seemed to satisfy him.

"Nay, what, Baasje [Literally, `little master.' A term of endearment],
you will not die this time. The thick leather of the boot has taken off
nearly all the poison, and all the running you have had since has done
the rest. Still, it was a near thing--a near thing. _'Maghtaag_!--if
the ar