rst-belt, never to be heard of again either in life or death.

To these, and such as these, this unfathomable tract of thirst-land was
nothing. To the whisky-and-soda drinking Englishman, with his
artificial wants, and general lack of resource and utter deficiency in
the bump of locality, it was, as in the case of the one lying here, a
tomb. To the lithe, serpentine savage, whose draught of water, and mess
of coarse _impupu_, or mealie porridge--when he could get it--it was a
joke. These two had learned this, and had turned it to account, even as
they were about to turn it to account again. They had been on the spoor
of the wanderer from the very first, with hardly more to eat or drink
than he. But then, they had not started after spending a night toasting
the Jameson Raid.

Now they looked at each other, and there was a complete inventory in
each devilish glance. Summed up, it read: A suit of clothes; item a
shirt, boots; item a revolver and a knife--which he was too exhausted
and which they would not give him time to use; item a watch and chain--
tradeable at some distant time and place; certainly some money--
available immediately. The horse, too. They need not trouble about it
now. They would find it easily enough afterwards, and then what a
feast! Of a truth their Snake was favourable to them again!

There lay the victim--there lay the prey. Gliding like evil wood-demons
from the edge of the trees they were over him now. One more glance
exchanged. Each had got his role. The doomed man lay still, with eyes
closed, and a churn of froth at the corners of the swollen lips. One
slowly raised his axe to bring it down on the skull. The other gripped
aloft his assegai. Both could not miss, and it was as well to provide
against contingencies--when--

The fiend with the axe leapt high in the air, falling backward, then
leaping half up again and performing a series of wondrous gyrations,--
this simultaneously with a sharp crack from the cover opposite, on the
farther side of the _sluit_,--shot fair and square and neatly through
the head. The fiend with the assegai knew better than to waste time
unprofitably by completing his stroke. He whirled round as on a pivot,
darting within the friendly trees with the rapidity of a startled snake.
But futilely. For one infinitesimal fraction of a second, Time decreed
that that gliding, dark body should be in line with a certain slit-like
vista in the mopani stems,