, and, by a concerted movement, swung it
and its human burden over the brink, where the pool was deepest. One
wild, appalling shriek, then a splash, and a turmoil of eddies and
bubbles rolling and scintillating on the surface, and the cold
remorseless face of the brilliant moon looked down, impassive, upon a
human creature thus horribly done to death.

"_Hlala-gahle_!" cried Shiminya, with a fiend-like laugh, watching the
uprising of the stream of bubbles. Then, turning to his fellow
miscreant, "And now, Nanzicele, whom Makiwa made a chief, and then
unmade, the people at Madula's can hardly speak for laughing at thee,
remembering thy last appearance there, bragging that thou wert a chief.
Makiwa has done this, but soon there may not be any Makiwa, for so I
read the fates. Go now. When I want thee I will send for thee again."

And the two murderers separated--Nanzicele, dejected and feeling as
though his freedom had gone from him for ever; Shiminya, chuckling and
elate, for the day had been a red letter one, and the human spider was
gorged full of human prey.

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE MEETING OF THE WAYS.

The mail-steamer from England had been docked early in Cape Town, and
the tables at lunch-time, in the dining room of Cogill's Hotel at
Wynberg, were quite full. There is something unmistakable about the
newly landed passenger, male or female, especially when taken
gregariously; and this comes out mainly in a wholly abnormal vivacity,
begotten presumably of a sense of emancipation from the cooped monotony
of shipboard, and a conversational tendency to hark back to the
incidents of the voyage, and the idiosyncrasies of the populace of the
recent floating prison. Add to this a display of brand new ribbons on
the hats of certain of the ornamental sex, bearing the name of the
floating prison aforesaid, and a sort of huddled up clannishness as of a
hanging together for mutual protection in a strange land.

With this phase of humanity were most of the tables filled. One,
however, was an exception, containing a square party of four, not of the
exuberantly lively order. To be perfectly accurate, though, only three
of these constituted a "party;" the fourth, a silent stranger, wearing
more the aspect of a man from up-country than one of the newly landed,
was unknown to the residue.

"What an abominable noise those people are making," remarked one of the
trio, a tall, thin, high-nosed person of about thirty, with a