nd, he was unarmed.

The _donga_ was of no depth, perhaps the height of a man, nor were the
sides perpendicular; further down where it joined the river-bed they
were both high and steep. Lithe, agile as monkeys or cats, the two
Kafirs sprang up the bank, gripping their blood-smeared knives, but--
each from a different end. They were going to assail him from two sides
at once.

Cool now, and deadly dangerous because cornered, in a lightning flash of
thought Wyvern decided upon his plan of campaign. He picked up two
stones, each large enough to constitute a handful.

The first to appear was his own boy, Sixpence, and no sooner did he
appear than he received one stone--hurled by a tolerably powerful arm,
and at five yards' distance--bang, crash on the forehead. It would have
broken any skull but a native skull. The owner of this particular skull
stopped short, staggered, reeled, shook his head stupidly, half-blinded
by the blood that was pouring down his face, then subsided;
incidentally, into a mass of prickly pear leaves--and thorns. Wyvern,
his eyes ablaze with the light of battle, stood, the other stone ready
in his right hand, ready to mete out to Number Two a like reception.

But the other did not appear. Instead, a volume of exclamations in
deep-toned Xosa, together with a wholly unaccountable hissing, came from
the other side of the bush by which he was standing. Wyvern stepped
forth. The other Kafir stood, literally anchored by a huge puff-adder
which was twined round his leg, not daring to use his knife lest missing
those sinuous coils he should fatally wound himself. And the hideous
bloated reptile, blown out in its wrath, hung there, tightening its
coils in spasmodic writhings as it struck the imprisoned limb again and
again with its deadly fangs.

"Throw down the knife, and I'll help you," cried Wyvern, in Boer Dutch.

But the savage, whether it was that he understood not a word of that
classic tongue, or that he had gone mad with a very frenzy of despair,
instead of obeying, with lightning-like swiftness, hurled the knife--a
long-bladed, keenly-ground butcher one--full at the speaker. Wyvern
sprang aside, but even then the whizz past his ear told that he had
looked death rather closely in the face that day.

His first act was to possess himself of the weapon, then
self-preservation moved him to go back to the other, and get possession
of his. The said other lay stupidly, still half-stunned,