to get at him? The chief was too proud to admit himself beaten
by asking the aid of the firearms of his white allies, whereas they, in
sheer admiration of the man's desperate intrepidity, forebore to use
them. Even John Dawes, notwithstanding his recent rough treatment and
narrow escape from the most barbarous of deaths, could hardly bring
himself to fire upon this sole survivor of the race which had so
abominably ill-used him.

But the difficulty solved itself unexpectedly. The savage, seeing
Gerard pushing his way to the front--seeing, too, the rifle in his hand,
mistook his intentions. If they were not going to purchase the pleasure
of taking his life at the price of losing one of their own, they should
not have it for nothing.

"Ho, cowards!" he roared with flashing eyes. "Ho, cowardly dogs who
fear one man. Go, tell your king I spit at his head-ring! Igazi--pu--
za!" And as the last long-drawn note of the ferocious war-shout of his
tribe escaped his lips, he turned and sprang out into empty air, and a
dull, heavy thud and the clink of metal upon stones rising upward to the
ears of those above, told that the last of the Igazipuza warriors had
died even as those who had gone before him had died--fierce, stubborn,
formidable to the end, but unyielding.

A gasp of relief, admiration, awe, went up from the spectators of this
powerfully tragic scene. Then they turned to leave the mount of death.

"_Whau_! these are _abatagati_ indeed!" quoth Sobuza. "But they are
right valiant fighters."

"And this, my father, what shall we do with it?" said one of the
warriors, designating the body of Ingonyama, which lay just as it had
fallen, covered with the great lion's skin. "Shall we not place it on
`the point of the Tooth,' that even the very birds may behold the fate
of the enemies of the Great Great One?"

"The king's orders did not say that," replied Sobuza, who was not free
from motives of class-feeling. "Ingonyama was a chief, and a brave man,
and now he is dead. Let him lie in peace, for was he not a chief?"

"What of this?" said Dawes, touching the lion's skin.

"We want it not," answered Sobuza. "It, too, looks like _tagati_. See!
The life was let out of it and its wearer by the same hole."

"That's a fact," said Dawes. "But, if you're so particular, we are not.
We are going to have this--eh, Sidgeley?" And he plucked the lion's
skin from the body of the dead chief.

The Zulus stared, then shr