er anxious to avoid bloodshed; he
therefore, greatly to old Vermack's disappointment, returned at once to
the farm.

A sad scene was revealed by the light of day inside the fort. Two of
the defenders lay dead, fallen from the platform to the ground, and a
third desperately wounded with an assegai through his breast, and who
had hitherto been unobserved, lay gasping out his life. But sadder
still was the spectacle near the gateway. There lay the Zulu chief,
Mangaleesu, with his faithful Kalinda leaning over him, the blood
flowing from a wound in her side mingling with his, which, regardless of
her own injury, she had been endeavouring to stanch. Just as she was
discovered she fell forward lifeless on the body of her husband.

"Och! the poor creature's kilt intirely," cried Biddy, who with Percy
and Lionel had hurried to assist her. "Och ahone! it's cruel to see one
so loving and true struck down. Yet it's better so than for her to have
lived and mourned the loss of her husband."

Biddy said this as she raised the inanimate body of the young Zulu
woman, and found, on placing a hand on her heart, that her spirit had
fled.

Percy and Lionel knelt by the side of their friend, whom they at first
hoped might have merely fainted from loss of blood; but after feeling
his pulse and heart, with unfeigned sorrow they were convinced that he
was dead. Others soon joined them, and carried the two corpses into the
room they had inhabited, there to wait their burial.

There had hitherto been but little time to welcome Denis, or to hear how
his father had been recovered.

"Sure we didn't recover him, he recovered himself," answered Denis to
the questions put to him. "He had been far away to the north of
Oliphants river, where, after having lost his oxen and fallen sick, he
was detained by an Amatonga chief, a regular savage, who from mere
wantonness used once a month to threaten to put him to death if his
friends did not send the heavy ransom he demanded, while all the time he
was detaining the messengers my father endeavoured to despatch to
Maritzburg. Wonderful however to relate, the savage chief became a
Christian through the influence of a native missionary, who had made his
way into that region. On this he at once released my father, supplied
him with fresh oxen, and enabled him to fill up his waggon with tusks
and skins. He had a long journey south, and reached Hendricks' camp the
very day after Captain Broderick