then it will be my turn; so, love, till that hour fare you
well. Stay, I forgot, I have news for you; your husband, the English
castaway, is dead."

At this tidings a low moan of pain broke from Suzanne's lips.

"Be silent and take no heed," whispered Sihamba, who was kneeling at her
side behind the shelter of the stone, "he does but lie to torment you."

"The bullet and the water together were too much for him," went on Swart
Piet, "and he died on the second night after he reached the stead. Your
father came to seek me in the place you know, and was carried home badly
wounded for his pains, but whether he lived or died I cannot tell you,
but I heard that your mother, the good Vrouw Botmar, is very sick, for
things have so fallen out lately that her mind is troubled, and she
flies to drink to comfort it."

Now when she heard this, Sihamba could keep silence no longer, but cried
in a mocking voice:

"Get you gone, Bull-Head, and take lessons in lying from your friends
of my trade, the Kaffir witch-doctors, for never before did I hear a man
bear false witness so clumsily. On the third night of his illness the
husband of Swallow was alive and doing well; the Heer Jan Botmar was not
wounded at all, and as for the Vrouw Botmar, never in her life did she
drink anything stronger than coffee, for the white man's firewater is
poison to her. Get you gone, you silly half-breed, who seek to deceive
the ears of Sihamba, and I counsel you, hold fast to your business of
theft and murder and give up that of lying, in which you will never
succeed. Now be off, you stink-cat of the rocks, lest I send some to
hunt you from your hole who this time will use the points and not the
shafts of their assegais. Come, Swallow, let us be going."

So they went, keeping under cover all the way to the camp, which,
indeed, was quite close to them, and if Swart Piet made any answer they
did not hear it. So soon as they reached it Sihamba told Sigwe what had
passed and he sent men to scour the cliff and the bush behind it, but of
Van Vooren they could find no trace, no, not even the spot where he had
been hidden, so that Sigwe came to believe that they had been fooled by
echoes and had never heard him at all.

But both Suzanne and Sihamba knew that this was not so; indeed, this
hearing of the voice of Swart Piet filled Suzanne with fear, since where
the voice was, there was the man, her hateful enemy, who had given his
life to her ruin and to that