blanket, which she placed reverently, almost
tenderly, over the dead body.

At that instant the dulled crack of a rifle-shot came from the direction
of the Inkouane road! Another! Alas! Hendrika knew what they meant.
Her husband was approaching, water was at hand, help near. Now the full
horror of her position smote upon her and froze her blood. All this
terrible crime might have been avoided if but those shots had been heard
one short hour ago. Her heart stood still, and she fell forward in a
deathlike swoon beside the body of the man she had slain.

When Piet Van Staden rode up five minutes later and found his wife lying
in a dead faint beside the yet warm corpse of Schalk Oosthuysen, even
his dull Dutch nature was stirred and harrowed. What in God's name
could it all mean?

Presently, with the aid of brandy and water, Hendrika came to herself,
and was able to tell her terrible story. It was a great shock to her
husband; but he had a strong faith in his wife's character, and he
understood well enough that only the direst straits and the prospect of
the almost instant death of their child could have induced her to take
the blood of a fellow-creature upon her hands.

They buried Oosthuysen's body that evening, and covered the grave with
thorns, and set a strong _scherm_ of thorns about it to keep off the
wild beasts. During the night their oxen came in, and they trekked next
day, with doubt and trepidation in their hearts, for Inkouane, where
dreadful scenes were enacting. The pits had been meanwhile choked up
with dead oxen, which had been cut out piecemeal; and now, the scant
mess of foul blood and fouler water being exhausted, men, women, and
children were enduring agonies of thirst. Men in such case were not
likely to be hard judges: their one thought was for their own safety.
Piet and his wife, therefore, having reported the full circumstances of
Oosthuysen's tragic death to the Boer leaders, were bidden to betake
themselves away and never trouble the expedition again. Glad enough
they were to escape thus lightly: blood for blood is usually the cry of
people in a state of semi-civilisation such as these Trek-Boers.

And so, like Hagar of old, the Van Stadens passed out into the
wilderness, and won their way with much toil and suffering to the
Okavango River, beyond Lake N'gami. But Hendrika never shook off her
trouble, or the feeling that unwittingly she had wrecked her husband's
life and doomed