d up the assegai. With a blow she broke the serpent's back,
and then with the sharp blade cut off its head.

But for Sinikwe life was now as good as ended. Despite his Bushman
remedies, the poison quickly overpowered him. After an hour and a half
of dreadful pain, gallantly borne, he fell into a torpor. As the sun
rose he lay upon the sand there dead.

An hour after sunrise Nakeesa quitted the spot. She left the body to
the vultures and jackals and hyaenas. A Bushman needs no burial.
Taking as much meat as she could carry, the unfinished water, and her
child, she set off to join Kwaneet. It was a long two days' journey,
this time cheerfully endured. Before sunset of the second day, she
squatted herself down by the side of the man of her choice, at the water
of Makwa.

"I am here, Kwaneet," she said. "Sinikwe is dead. A snake slew him at
night by the giraffe. Take me, I am thine."

So Kwaneet, not displeased, took Nakeesa to wife, and for a year or more
they wandered about the desert, hunting, drinking at this pit and that;
sometimes, when the drought gripped that thirsty land, devouring the
bitter water-melons in place of drink, as they roamed the great deserts
and followed the game. Those were the pleasantest days of Nakeesa's
hard life. She had never known flesh so abundant; they wandered far
afield into the most secluded haunts of the game, and Kwaneet had never
been so successful in his hunting. Moreover, Kwaneet was neither a
difficult man to live with, nor a hard master, and Nakeesa, by nature,
like many Masarwa women, a great conversationalist, soon found herself
acquiring a strong influence over the simple, easily managed hunter.
Yet she had a great affection for Kwaneet, and tempered her sway with
many little amenities.

In their second winter together the drought had been intense; not a pit
or sucking-hole held water in the desert, there were no melons, and the
game had nearly all trekked for the rivers. And so Kwaneet and Nakeesa,
too, had quitted the open veldt and the waterless forest, and lived
temporarily on the banks of the upper Tamalakan, north-east of Lake
Ngami.

One morning Kwaneet came back to their camping-place with a piece of
welcome news. Half a mile away he had found the carcase of a fat zebra,
killed by a lion quite recently, and only a quarter devoured. Here was
a ready-made feast, without the trouble of hunting. Nakeesa had two
children now; her elder, a boy, by Sin