y the same as regards yourselves," rejoined Laurence.
"What in the world made them give you quarter?"

"Don't know," answered Hazon. "We managed to get together, back to back,
we two, and were fighting like cats. Holmes got a shot on the head with
a club that sent him down, and I got stuck full of assegais till I
couldn't see. The next thing I knew was that we were being carted along
in the middle of a big _impi_--Heaven knew where. One thing, we were
both alive--alive and kicking, too. As soon as we were able to walk they
assegaied our bearers, and--made us walk."

"Don't you swallow all that, Stanninghame," cut in Holmes. "He fought,
standing over me--fought like any devil, the Ba-gcatya say, although he
makes out now it was all playful fun."

"Well, for the matter of that, we had to fight," rejoined Hazon
tranquilly. "Where have you been all this time, Stanninghame?"

"Here, at Imvungayo. And you two?"

"Shot if I know. They kept us at some place away in the mountains. Only
brought us here a few days back."

"They won't let us out in the daytime," chimed in Holmes. "And it's
getting deadly monotonous. But tell us, old chap, how it is they didn't
stick you?"

This, however, Laurence, following out a vein of vague instinct, had
decided not to do, wherefore he invented some commonplace solution. And
it was with strange and mingled feelings he sat there listening to his
old confederates. For months he had not heard one word of the English
tongue, and now these two, risen, as it were, from the very grave,
seemed to bring back all the past, which, under novel and strange
conditions, had more and more been fading into the background. He was
even constrained to admit to himself that such feelings were not those
of unmingled joy. He had almost lost all inclination to escape from
among this people, and now these two, by the very associations which
their presence recalled, were likely to unsettle him again, possibly to
his own peril and undoing. Anyway, he resolved to say nothing as to the
incident of "The Sign of the Spider."

"Well, you seem to have got round them better than we did,
Stanninghame," said Hazon, with a glance at the Express rifle and
revolver wherewith the other was armed. "We have hardly been allowed so
much as a stick."

"So? Well, I've been teaching some of them to shoot. That may have had a
little to do with it. In fact, I've been laying myself out to make
thoroughly the best of the situation."