first time I became conscious to what a little
thing I owed my salvation. That matter of the broken halter was like
the finger of Divine Providence. I had been saved for a purpose, and
unless I fulfilled that purpose I should again be lost. I was always a
fatalist, and in that hour of strained body and soul I became something
of a mystic. My panic ceased, my lethargy departed, and a more manly
resolution took their place. I gripped the Schimmel by the head and
turned him due left. Now I remembered where the highroad ran, and I
remembered something else.

For it was borne in on me that Laputa had fallen into my hands.
Without any subtle purpose I had played a master game. He was cut off
from his people, without a horse, on the wrong side of the highroad
which Arcoll's men patrolled. Without him the rising would crumble.
There might be war, even desperate war, but we should fight against a
leaderless foe. If he could only be shepherded to the north, his game
was over, and at our leisure we could mop up the scattered
concentrations.

I was now as eager to get back into danger as I had been to get into
safety. Arcoll must be found and warned, and that at once, or Laputa
would slip over to Inanda's Kraal under cover of dark. It was a matter
of minutes, and on these minutes depended the lives of thousands. It
was also a matter of ebbing strength, for with my return to common
sense I saw very clearly how near my capital was spent. If I could
reach the highroad, find Arcoll or Arcoll's men, and give them my news,
I would do my countrymen a service such as no man in Africa could
render. But I felt my head swimming, I was swaying crazily in the
saddle, and my hands had scarcely the force of a child's. I could only
lie limply on the horse's back, clutching at his mane with trembling
fingers. I remember that my head was full of a text from the Psalms
about not putting one's trust in horses. I prayed that this one horse
might be an exception, for he carried more than Caesar and his fortunes.

My mind is a blank about those last minutes. In less than an hour
after my escape I struck the highway, but it was an hour which in the
retrospect unrolls itself into unquiet years. I was dimly conscious of
scrambling through a ditch and coming to a ghostly white road. The
schimmel swung to the right, and the next I knew some one had taken my
bridle and was speaking to me.

At first I thought it was Laputa and screamed.