becomes jolly. That is where he is such a fool."

They hid the horses well down over the other side of the ridge, lest the
approach of the other animals should cause them to neigh, then returned
to their positions under the rocks. The road was about three hundred
yards beneath, and on the other side of it was the river bed, now dry.
This circumstance, too, came into the strategy of the murderous pair.

"See now, Mani," [Hermanus abbreviated], said Gideon Roux. "If we shoot
as we always shoot, both will drop into the river bed. And to-night,"
looking upward at a black cloud which was thickly and gradually
spreading, "the river will come down. I will take the Englishman, and
you take the Hottentot."

"_Ja_, but I am not so sure with these damned Mausers," growled Hermanus
Delport, looking up and down his weapon. "I might miss--then where
would we be? We had better have kept to our old Martinis. We
understand them."

"_Nee, nee_. It comes to the same thing, I tell you, and if you miss
you can go on shooting until you _raak_. I know _I_ shan't miss.
_Maagtig, kerel_! What are you doing? Put away that pipe!"

But Hermanus protested he was not going to do without his smoke for all
the adjectival English in Africa or in England either, and it took at
least ten minutes of his confederate's time and talk to persuade him
that not only the spark but the smoke of a pipe was visible for any
distance in the clear, yet half-gloomy atmosphere then prevailing. For
the leaden lour of the heavens pointed to the coming of a storm.

In effect the surroundings were very much in harmony with the dark deed
of blood which these two miscreants were here to perpetrate. The wild
and rugged recesses of the Wildschutsbergen, sparsely inhabited and but
seldom travelled, spread around in grim, forbidding desolation. Great
krantzes towered skyward, rearing up from the apex of smooth
boulder-strewn grass slopes, and here and there a lofty coffee-canister
shaped cone, turret-headed, and belted round with the same smooth
cliff-face, stood like a giant sentinel. Below, the valleys, deep and
rugged, seamed with dongas, and that through which the track lay,
skirting the now dry bed of the Sneeuw River. No sign of life was upon
this abode of desolation; no grazing flock, or stray _klompje_ of
horses, not even a bird, springing chirruping from the grass; and away
yonder the further crags stood against a background of inky cloud,
which,