y
complete charm of her personality. Not for the first time either did he
find himself marvelling how this pride of possession should be his at
all. Though only in the early twenties Lalante had had time and
opportunity for "experiences," but such experiences, however disquieting
to the other parties to them, had left her unscathed. She had come to
him heart-whole. None before him had ever had power to awaken her.
That had been reserved for him, and the awakening had been mutual from
the very first.

"We'd better leave the horses here, Le Sage," suggested Wyvern as they
drew near the _donga_ wherein the unfortunate Kafir would be lying.
"It'll be cool for Lalante under these trees, and the place is only a
hundred yards further. Moreover we shall have to scramble a bit to get
to it."

Le Sage glumly assented, cursing the bother of the whole business. He
had just got home off a journey and here he was, lugged out over miles
of veldt because an infernal fool of a nigger had got bitten by a snake.
The Field-cornet job wasn't good enough at that price, and he'd chuck
it.

Thus grumbling, he followed Wyvern in what was literally a scramble, not
always free from danger either; for the river bank along the face of
which they had to make their way here was steep enough to be almost
precipitous, and high enough to render a fall on to the stones below a
contingency not to be contemplated with equanimity. But fortune
favoured them, and they gained their objective without accident.

"_Magtig_! what a beastly hole," grunted Le Sage, as they stood within
the mouth of the donga. "Well, the brute must be pretty far gone by
this time. Sss! I can smell him already. We'd better start our pipes,
Wyvern."

They were standing at the bottom of a narrow rift some thirty feet in
depth, its sides narrowing walls of a sandy-clayey soil and looking
uncomfortably suggestive of the possibility of falling in upon them. A
close network of boughs and prickly pear plants overhead well-nigh shut
off the light of day, turning the place into a regular cavern. A little
further and the walls narrowed, necessitating single file progress.

"A devilish unpleasant place to find oneself confronted in by a _kwai
geel slang_," [Note 1] said Wyvern--who was leading--over his shoulder,
grimly. "We couldn't dodge him at any price here."

"Yes, yes. But what about the nigger?" said the other testily. "Where
the devil is he?"

The same idea had