in. In this he recognised the voice of his mother.
Cocking his gun, he ran hurriedly forward, but before he could gain the
front door he was met by several savages armed with axes and
knobkerries. Two of these he immediately shot--shot them dead, too, he
declared--and then, before he could slip in fresh cartridges, they were
upon him. The gun was wrenched from his hand, then something seemed to
fall upon his head, for after that he knew no more.

All this was told spasmodically between lengthened pauses, and the
effort had quite exhausted the poor little fellow. And now some inkling
of the situation seemed to rush through Nidia's reeling brain, though
even then the idea that this wholesale murder was but one instance of
several at that very moment throughout the land, did not occur to her.
She supposed it to be a mere sporadic outbreak of savagery, or lust of
plunder. It was clear, too, that this poor child was ignorant of all
that had actually happened within, and she felt a sort of miserable
consolation in realising that physical agony had so confused his mind
that he showed no curiosity on the subject. Nor would he allow her to
examine the extent of his hurts. If she so much as touched him he
screamed aloud; but she knew, as confidently as though assured by the
whole faculty, that his hours were numbered.

"I feel sleepy. How dark it is!" he murmured at length.

Dark! Why, the surroundings were in a very bath of lustre--of golden
sunlight glow.

"So sleepy. Don't leave me. Promise you won't leave me!"

"Of course I won't leave you, Jimmie darling," sobbed Nidia, bending
down and kissing his forehead; for well she knew what this deepening
coma portended. Soon again he spoke, but in the feeblest of murmurs.
"You must go. They'll come back and find you; then they'll kill you,
the devils. You must go. Hide in the bush, down below the river-bank.
They won't look there. Go--go quick. They'll come back. Hark! I hear
them."

"But I won't go, Jimmie; I won't leave you, whether they kill me or
not," she sobbed, moved to the heart by the unselfishness of this
child-hero, who had first slain with his own hand two of the murderers
of his parents, and now was urging her to leave him to the solitude he
dreaded, lest she should meet with the same fate. But this heroic
injunction was his last utterance. A few minutes, and the head fell
back, the eyes opening wide in a glassy stare. Little Jimmie had joined