Now run," he called out. "I'll draw the brute on."

But he had reckoned without the innate ferocity of the said brute, for
now uttering a fiendish hiss, it hurled itself straight at horse and
rider. Nearly the whole of its huge length seemed to rise from the
ground in that tremendous leap. The horse instinctively reared itself
up on its hind legs, receiving the deadly fangs full in the chest, then
whirling round, fell--fell right on to the writhing monster. And the
rider?

With rare readiness of nerve and judgment the latter had slid from the
saddle at exactly the right fraction of a moment, and now stood
contemplating a furious convulsive intermingling of kicking hoofs and
heaving coils. One deft slash of the raw-hide whip was capable of
cutting the head off the terrible reptile, if only he could get it in.
Then he suddenly grasped the fact that there was no need to do anything
further at all. Though still squirming hideously the monster was dead.
We have said that the horse, in falling, had come right down upon the
reptile, and now it was found that the iron pommel of the saddle had
snapped its vertebrae. The destroyed had in turn become the destroyer.
It had avenged itself.

Its owner, however, gave it no thought just then. He turned to the
girl. She was standing, with a large stone poised in her hand, a look
of desperate resolution in her eyes. The man, for his part, decided
that here was a picture he should never forget; the erect stateliness of
the pose: the expression: the sublimity of a great resolution which had
crushed down terror. She was magnificent, he told himself--lovely too.

"Why didn't you make yourself scarce while you could?" he said. "I told
you to, you know."

"I wanted to see if I could be of some use," she answered, dropping the
stone which she had instinctively picked up as being the only
approximate form of weapon at hand. "I should certainly have been
killed if it hadn't been for you. And the wonder is you weren't. But
your horse--I suppose there's no chance for him?"

"None whatever. The bite of a mamba of that size and volume is
absolutely fatal to man or beast."

"It is a mamba then? But the size of it?"

"Yes. It's the _indhlondhlo_--the crested variety. I've only seen one
before, and it was nothing like the size of this. They are rather
scarce."

"And a good thing too," said the girl with something of a shudder as
they stood contemplating the still moving co