ing out all his strength, he tried to drag
the horses round. Jess turned herself on the seat to look, and just then
a blaze of lightning flamed which revealed Muller and his two companions
standing dismounted on the bank, the muzzles of their rifles pointing
straight at the cart.

"O God!" she screamed, "they are going to shoot us."

Even as the words passed her lips three tongues of fire flared from the
rifles' mouths, and the Zulu Mouti, sitting by her side, pitched heavily
forward on to his head into the bottom of the cart, while one of the
wheelers reared straight up into the air with a shriek of agony, and
fell with a splash into the river.

Then followed a scene of horror indescribable. Overhead the storm burst
in fury, and flash after flash of fork, or rather chain lightning, leapt
into the river. The thunder, too, began to crack like the trump of doom;
the wind rushed down, tearing the surface of the water into foam, and,
catching under the tent of the cart, lifted it quite off the wheels, so
that it began to float. Then the two leaders, made mad with fear by the
fury of the storm and the dying struggles of the off-wheeler, plunged
and tore at the traces till at last they rent themselves loose and
vanished between the darkness overhead and the boiling water beneath.
Away floated the cart, now touching the bottom and now riding on the
river like a boat, oscillating this way and that, and slowly turning
round and round. With it floated the dead horse, dragging down the other
wheeler beneath the water. It was awful to see his struggles in the
glare of the lightning, but at last he sank and choked.

Meanwhile, sounding sharply and clearly through the din and hubbub of
the storm, came the cracking of the three rifles whenever the flashes
showed the position of the cart to the murderers on the bank. Mouti was
lying still in the bottom of it on the bed-plank, a bullet between his
broad shoulders and another in his skull: but John felt that his life
was yet whole in him, though something had hissed past his face and
stung it. Instinctively he reached across the cart and drew Jess on to
his knee, and cowered over her, thinking dimly that perhaps his body
would protect her from the bullets.

_Rip! rip!_ through the wood and canvas; _phut! phut!_ through the air;
but some merciful power protected them, and though one cut John's coat
and two passed through the skirt of Jess's dress, not a bullet struck
them. Very soon