which, I noticed, had
stopped at twenty-three minutes after six--while the other body was
quite unrecognisable. There was nothing to show how either of these men
had died.

Leaving the hall, I entered the dining-room; and the moment I did so it
became apparent that I had arrived upon the scene of the last stand of
the little garrison, where the final phase of the stubborn and
protracted attack and defence had been fought out. For the room was in
a terrible state of confusion, the scattered remains of the heavy
furniture showing that the savages had actually succeeded in forcing the
barricade and gaining an entrance--this evidence being confirmed by the
presence of nine Tembu corpses piled up in the window opening. And
within arm's length of them lay another corpse--that of my father, still
grasping in his right hand the trusty cavalry sabre that had served him
so well in his campaigning days, while his left held a pistol. Three
Tembu spearheads in his body, one of which had evidently passed through
his heart, told how he had died. A few feet away, right up against the
front wall, I noticed a pile of scorched, brittle stuff that, as I
cautiously probed it with the barrel of my rifle, proved to be burnt
rugs. The three upper layers were burnt to a cinder, but the fourth was
only scorched, while the last was scarcely singed; and beneath this lay
the body of my mother, the flesh slightly darkened by the smoke of the
burnt woollen rugs, but otherwise not disfigured at all. A bullet hole
in the very centre of her forehead told me all that I wanted to know;
and while I cast myself on my knees in the ashes beside that beloved
form, a tempest of dry sobs rending my bosom as I realised for the first
time all that I had lost, I felt thankful that my father had found the
courage and resolution at the last moment to save her, even though by
such dreadful means, from falling alive into the hands of the fiendishly
ferocious Tembu.

In the remaining rooms I found seven more corpses, all of them being
those of Totties, who had either perished in defending the house or had
died of suffocation. And nowhere but in the dining-room had the savages
ever succeeded in gaining even a temporary footing, while the general
appearance of the ruins showed that they had not entered after the
flames had died out; indeed, I doubted whether they had even deferred
their departure until then, for they must have known at last that
nothing could p