In uttering that sublime lie, Hilary Blachland had set the seal to his
triumph.
But for it his comrade would have refused to leave him, on that point he
was sure, whereas to throw away his life for one who was dead already,
would be an act of sheer lunacy on Skelsey's part. One must die or
both, and he had elected to be that one. Yet the actual horror and
sting of the death which now stared him in the face was indescribably
terrible.
Instinctively he took cover behind a stone--for the ground here was open
and broken. The Matabele, reckoning him a sure prey sooner or later,
had stayed their forward rush, and, halting within the bush line, began
to parley, and not altogether without reason, for there was something
rather formidable in the aspect of this well-armed man, who although but
one against their swarming numbers, was manifestly determined to sell
his life very dearly indeed. They had some experience as to what that
meant--and recently.
"Ho, Isipau!" called out a great voice. "Come now and talk with some of
your old friends."
"I think not, Ziboza," came the answer. "For the looks of most of you
are not friendly."
"Are you come to capture the Great Great One, Isipau?" jeered another
voice, and a shout of derision backed up the words.
"No. I came to find a comrade who was left behind sick. I have found
him--and now, _amadoda_, when I return I can speak more than one good
word on behalf of the Great Great One, and of those who suffered me to
return when they might have given me some trouble."
"When thou returnest, Isipau!" roared several of the young warriors with
a burst of mocking laughter. "When thou returnest! _Au_! But that
will be never."
"Nobody knows. I do not--you do not. But it will be better for all
here if I do return."
For a while there was no response, save another burst of laughter. Then
Ziboza spoke:
"Come now over to us, Isipau. We will take thee to the Black Elephant."
Blachland pondered. Could he trust them? If they actually meant to
take him to the King, then indeed he stood a good chance, for he did not
believe that Lo Bengula would allow him to be harmed, and he did believe
that once face to face with him he could persuade the fugitive King to
surrender. But could he trust them, that was the crux?
Rapidly he ran over the situation within his mind. This Ziboza he knew
fairly well as an inveterate hater of the whites, one of those moreover
who had perpetually urged upon Lo Bengula the necessity of murdering all
white men in his country. He thought too, of the moment, when disarmed
and helpless, he should stand at their mercy, and what that "mercy"
would mean why more than one act of hideous barbarity which he himself
had witnessed, was sufficient to remind him. Moreover, even while thus
balancing probabilities, certain scraps of smothered conversation
reached his ears. That decided him. He would not place himself within
their power. It only remained to sell his life dearly.
If only it were near the close of the day, he could hold them off for a
while, and perhaps, under cover of darkness, escape. But it was hardly
yet full noon. They could get round him and rake him with a cross fire.
Bad marksmen as they were, they could hardly go on missing him all day.
"Come then, Isipau!" called out Ziboza. "Lay down thy weapons and
come."
"No. Go ye now away and leave me. Peace is not far distant and many
good words will I speak for you because of this day."
A jeering roar, now of rage, now of disappointment, greeted his words.
At the same time Blachland sighted one of them kneeling down with his
piece levelled, and taking deliberate aim at him. An instinct moved him
to drop down behind the stone, and the instinct was a true one, for as
he did so a bullet sang through the spot where his head and shoulders
had been but a fraction of a second before. Two others hummed over him,
but high.
He put his hat up above the stone, holding it by the brim. "Whigge!"--
another bullet hummed by, almost grazing it.
"Some devil there can shoot, anyway," he growled to himself. "If only I
could get a glint of him. Ah!"
A stratagem had occurred to him. He managed to fix the hat just so that
the top of it should project, then creeping to the edge of the boulder,
he peered round, his piece sighted and ready. Just as he thought. The
head and shoulders of a savage, taking aim at the hat--and then with the
crash of his own rifle that savage was spinning round and turning a
convulsive somersault, shot fair and square through the head. His
slayer set his teeth, with a growl that was half exulting, half a curse.
His foes were going to find that they had cornered a lion indeed--so
much he could promise them.
The mutterings of wrath and dismay which arose among them over this neat
shot, were drowned in a furious volley. Every man who possessed a
firearm seemed animated with a kind of frenzied desire to discharge it
as quickly and as often as possible at and around the rock behind which
he lay. For a few moments the position was very sultry indeed. It
might have been worse but that the moral of that deadly shot rendered
his assailants exceedingly unwilling to leave their cover or expose
themselves in any way.
On his right the river bank was but a couple of hundred yards, and
running up from this was a bush-fringed donga, which might be any or no
depth, but which ended at about half that distance. Upon this Blachland
had got his eye and was puzzling out as to how he might turn it to
account. Now he discovered that the same idea was occurring to his
assailants, for although the intervening space was almost devoid of
bush, the grass was long and tangled from the bush line to the chasm,
and it was shaking and quivering in a very suspicious manner.
"Great minds jump together," he muttered grimly, all his attention
centred on this point, and entirely disregarding a terrific fire which
was suddenly opened upon him, with the object, he suspected, of
diverting it. "Just as I thought."
One glimpse only, of the naked, crawling savage, flattened to the earth,
but even that was sufficient. The thud of the bullet ploughing through
ribs and vitals, was music to his ears as that savage flattened out more
completely, beating the earth in his death throes; and a very shout of
exultant snarling laughter escaped him--mingling with the roar of rage
that went up from his enemies. He was growing terrible now--ferocious,
bloodthirsty, as his ruthless foes, yet cool and firm as the rock behind
which he lay.
"Two shots, two birds!" he exclaimed. "If I can keep on at this rate
it's good enough."
The assailants were now mad with rage. They howled out taunts and
jeers, and blood-curdling promises of the vengeance they would wreak
upon him when they got him into their power. At this he laughed--
laughed long and loud.
"That will be never!" he cried. "Ho, Ziboza, thou valiant fighting
induna. How many of the King's hunting dogs does it take to pull down
one lion? Are the Ingubu all killed or have they driven thee from their
midst to follow a new leader? But I tell thee, Ziboza, thou art a dead
man this day. I may be, but thou art surely."
"Ah--ah--'Sipau!" snarled the chief. "It is easy to boast, but thou art
cornered. We have thee now."
"Not yet. And a cornered animal is a dangerous one. Come and take me."
To this interchange of amenities succeeded a lull. Clearly they were
planning some fresh surprise. And then Blachland started, with a pang
of sharp pain. His left hand was streaming blood. Then his spirits
rose again. It was only a cut. A splinter of stone, chipped by one of
their bullets, had struck him, but the wound was a trivial one. With
the discovery, however, came another, and one which was by no means
trivial. The bullet had been fired at a different angle from those
hitherto. The ground on the left front rose slightly. His enemies were
getting round him on that side. Soon he would be exposed to a complete
flanking fire.
The worst of it was that in that direction he could see nobody. The
cover was too good. He wondered they had not occupied this before,
unless it were that they deemed it of the highest importance to cut off
all chance of his escape by the river. Yet what chance had he there? A
mere choice of deaths, for it was rolling down in flood, and between
this and their fire from the bank, why, there was none at all.
And now the sun, which had been shining warm and glowing above this
scene of stern and deadly strife, upon the beleaguered man, desperate,
fighting to the last, beset by a swarm of persistent and ruthless foes--
suddenly grew dark. A shadow had curtained its face, black and
lowering. Blachland sent a hasty glance upward. One of those storms,
almost of daily occurrence now in the rainy season, would shortly break
over them. Would it bring him any advantage, however trifling--was his
eager thought? At any rate it could not alter his position for the
worse. And the hoarse and sullen boom of thunder mingled with the
vengeful spit of the rifles of his enemies, now more frequent and more
deadly because taking him from a new and almost unprotected quarter.
Ha! What was this? Under cover of this last diversion his enemies had
been stealing up. They were coming on in dozens, in scores, from the
first point of attack. Selecting two of the foremost, one behind the
other, he fired--and his aim was true, but at the same time his rifle
fell from his grasp, and his arm and shoulder felt as though crushed
beneath a waggon wheel. With fiendish yells, drowning the gasping cry
of the stricken warriors, the whole body of them poured forward. At the
same time, those on the rise behind, left their cover, and charged down
upon him, rending the air with their ear-splitting whistles.
He saw what had happened. The rifle had been struck by a bullet, and
the concussion had for the moment paralysed him. Only for the moment
though. Quick as the vivid flash which flamed down upon him from the
now darkened heavens, his mind was made up. With a suddenness and a
fleetness which took even his enemies by surprise, he had broken from
his cover, and was racing headlong for the point of the donga which led
down to the river.
In a second he will gain it. They cannot fire, every nerve is strained
to overtake him, to head him off. He sees their foremost line. Now it
is in front of him. No, not quite! His revolver is out, and the heavy
bullet crashes almost point blank through the foremost. Another springs
up in front of him, a gigantic warrior, his broad spear upraised.
Before it can descend the fugitive is upon him, and the momentum is too
great. Grappled together they topple over the edge, and go crashing
down, the white man and the savage, into unknown depths.
The bushes close over their heads and they are in almost total darkness.
There is a mighty splash of water and both are engulfed--yet, still
grappled, they rise to the surface again, and the blue glare of the
lightning, darting down, reveals the slanting earth walls of the chasm,
reveals to each the face of the other as they rise above the turgid
water, gasping and sputtering. The savage has lost his assegai in the
fall, and the white man is groping hungrily, eagerly, for his sheath
knife.
"Ah, ah! Ziboza! Did I not tell thee thou wert dead?"
"Not yet, dog Makiwa!" growls the other, in the ferocity of desperation
striving to bury his great teeth in his adversary's face. But Blachland
is in condition as hard as steel, and far more at home in the water than
the Matabele chief, so while gripping the latter by the wrists, he ducks
his head beneath the surface, endeavouring to drown him if possible. He
dare not let go his hold lest he should be the one grasped, and those
above dare not fire down for fear of shooting their chief--even if they
could see the contending parties--which they cannot. But the awful
reverberations of the thunder-peal boom and shiver within that pit as of
hell, and the lightnings gleam upon the brown turgid surface, and the
straining faces of the combatants are even as those of striving fiends.
They touch ground now, then lose it again, for the bottom is but a
foothold of slippery mud. Nearer, nearer to the main stream their
struggles have carried them, until the sombre roar of the flood sounds
deafening in their ears, and still the awful strife goes on.
"Ah--ah, Ziboza. I told thee thou shouldst meet death this day. _Ha!
Nantzia_! [that is it] _Ha_!"
And with each throaty, bloodthirsty gasp he plunges the knife, which he
has at last managed to free, into the body of the nearly exhausted
chief, drawing it down finally in a terrible ripping stroke. A single
gasping groan, and Ziboza sinks, as his adversary throws him from him.
And then the said adversary knows no more. The swirl of the flood
sweeping into the chasm, seems to rope him out, and the body of Hilary
Blachland, together with that of his savage antagonist, is borne down
within the raging rush of waters, rolling over and over on its way to
the Zambesi and the sea.