with a dummy. After you two had cleared, I
rigged up the real thing, and it consisted of I shouldn't like to say
how many pounds of dynamite. It seems to have answered finely. Only,
Ancram, I shan't be able to entertain you again under my more or less
inhospitable roof for a good long time to come, because my poor old
shack has just been blown off the face of the earth, and with it.
Heaven knows how many Matabele."

"D'you mean to say you've blown up your own house, Lamont?"

"Not me--but the confiding savage who'd called to cut our three throats
while we were asleep--as he thought. We knew he would, and--he did."

"By Jove, what a sell for them! Why, you're a genius, Lamont!"
pronounced Ancram admiringly.

"Anyhow," said Peters, "it's been the saving of our lives so far, for
otherwise, directly they found we weren't in the place, they'd have
started out to look for us. Now they won't, because there'll be few
enough left to do it, and those'll be more'n sick of us by this time."

"It'll be the saving of the lives of a good many white men, when the
news spreads, as it soon will," appended Lamont. "It'll make 'em think
twice before they meddle with houses in future--too much _tagati_ about
the job--and so our fellows will get a show."

He was thinking, too, of the stories he had filled up old Qubani with,
on the Gandela race-course, as to how the ground immediately around the
township was extensively mined; and now this last manoeuvre of his would
go to confirm it. The savage has a holy horror of unseen danger. He
might, indirectly, have been the means of again saving Gandela, at a
very perilous and critical time. Then he fell to wondering whether
Clare Vidal was already away and safe at Buluwayo.

Day broke upon an expanse of wild, hilly country, moderately bushed.
Huge baboons barked at them from their fastnesses among the piles of
craggy boulders which heaved up here and there against a drear and
lowering sky, and which seemed a perfect rookery of predatory birds--
falcons and buzzards and kites--soaring and circling aloft. And now a
halt was called.

"About time too," groaned Ancram. "I don't believe I could have gone a
step farther."

The other two made no comment upon this, but both were thinking the same
thought. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and that link in
this chain spelt Ancram. He was dead tired already, he declared, and
his boots were wearing holes in his feet into th