The sun flamed down from a cloudless sky upon the green and gold of the
wide valley, hot and sensuous in the early afternoon. The joyous piping
of sheeny spreeuws mingled with the crowing of cock koorhans concealed
amid the grass, or noisily taking to flight to fuss up half a dozen
others in the process. Mingled, too, with all this, came the swirl of
the red, turgid river, whose high-banked, willow-fringed bed cut a dark
contrasting line through the lighter hue of the prevailing bush. From
his perch a white-necked crow was debating in his mind as to whether a
certain diminutive tortoise crawling among the stones was worth the
trouble of cracking and eating, or not.
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Wyvern moved stealthily forward, step by step, his pulses tingling with
excitement. Then parting some boughs which came in the way he peered
down into the _donga_ which lay beneath. What he saw was not a pleasant
sight, but--it was what he had expected to see.
Two Kafirs were engaged in the congenial, to them, occupation of
butchering a sheep. Not a pleasant sight we have said, but to this man
doubly unpleasant, for this was one of his own sheep--not the first by
several, as he suspected. Well, he had caught the rascals red-handed at
last.
Wyvern stood there cogitating as to his line of action. The Kafirs,
utterly unsuspicious of his presence, went on with their cutting and
quartering, chattering gleefully in their deep-toned voices, as to what
good condition the meat was in, and what a succulent feast they would
have when the darkness of night should enable them to fetch it away to
the huts from this remote and unsuspected hiding-place. One was clad in
a pair of greasy moleskin trousers, hitched up to his shoulders by a
pair of filthy braces, largely repaired with string; the other was clad
in nothing at all, unless a string of blue beads round his neck counted
for anything. In the trouser-wearing savage Wyvern recognised one of
his own herds, whose absence from the flock under his charge had led to
the present discovery. The other, a tall, powerful, desperate-looking
scoundrel with a deeply pock-marked countenance, he did not recognise at
all.
It was all very well to have caught them red-handed, but the question
was, what course to pursue. They were two to one, hard, wiry savages at
that. They had sheath knives and he was unarmed; for a pocket-knife is
of little or no use as a defensive weapon in that it is bound to shut on
the hand of the wielder. They were engaged in an act the penalty of
which spelt lashes and fine, or, at best a year's hard labour; was it
likely they would submit meekly to capture? And then, as there flitted
through his mind a recent instance of a stock fanner being
unhesitatingly murdered under precisely similar circumstances, Wyvern
began to realise that his own position was one of some little danger.
Would it not be wiser to withdraw now, and take steps for trapping the
culprits when he should have more force at his disposal? Decidedly here
was food for reflection.
But the matter was taken out of his hands by one of those unforeseen
trifles upon which so much may turn. In his eagerness to watch the
proceedings just below he had let one hand come into contact with the
leaf of a prickly pear, which sprouted interwoven with the bushes
through which he was peering. Now contact with an ordinary thorn would
not have moved him, but contact with these innumerable and microscopic
stings, as it were, which once in the skin are bound to leave painful
recollection of that fact even for weeks, inspired a sort of instinctive
horror that had made him start. Even before the stone which he had
dislodged beneath his foot had begun to roll into the _donga_ the two
miscreants looked up quickly and saw him.
The startled ejaculation which escaped them, gave way to a rapid murmur.
Wyvern caught but one word and that was sufficient. He knew that he
was about to fight for his life--and, 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, but he had
dropped his knife in the fall. This, too, Wyvern picked up, and now,
feeling equal to the pair of them, he went back to where the man and the
snake were still struggling.
And a ghastly and horrible scene met his eyes. The man, who seemed to
have gone completely mad, was plucking and tearing at the snake,
uttering the most hideous howls, and literally foaming at the mouth, as
he strove to free himself from those terrible coils. He must have been
bitten again and again, as now with his hands within the reptile's very
mouth he strove to tear its head asunder. The struggle had brought him
to the brink of a much deeper part of the _donga_, and now, as Wyvern
looked, puzzled what to do next, seemed to be weakening or to lose his
balance. He swayed, then toppled heavily through the bushes, and man
and snake went crashing down the well-nigh perpendicular bank.
His own peril thus removed, Wyvern's blood curdled within him at the
horror he had witnessed. He went to the place and looked over, but
could see nothing. It was too much overhung with bushes--and save for
where these had been displaced by a heavy body crashing through, there
was no sign or trace of life; no sound either. Probably with all that
venom in his system the wretched Kafir was already in the state of coma
which should precede death. For him there was no chance, absolutely
none. Wyvern went back to where he had left the other.
"Now, Sixpence," he said, speaking in the _taal_, which in the Cape
Colony is the usual means of communication between white men and
natives, "stand up, and put your hands behind you. I'm going to tie
them."
But the fellow begged and prayed that he might be spared this. He would
not try to run away, he protested. Where was the use, since his wife
and children were at the huts, and besides, was he not well known?
Farther he felt very ill, and hardly able to walk as it was, from the
effects of the terrible blow the Baas had given him. Perhaps, too, on
the strength of that the Baas might bring himself to forgive him. He
would serve him so faithfully after that--and the Baas could take twice
the value of the sheep out of his wages. Surely the Baas might bring
himself to forgive him.
Wyvern, contemplating him, thought he might even be fool enough to do
that; and as he put back into his pocket the lanyard of _reimpje_
wherewith he had intended to tie the fellow's hands, he feared that he
might.
"I don't know about that, Sixpence," he said. "You have been a pretty
_schelm_ sort of a boy, you know. Besides, you would have killed me,
you and that other. Who is he, by the way?"
"One of Baas Ferreira's boys, Baas," naming a Dutchman whose farm
adjoined the river on the other side.
"Well, and which of you was it that planned this _slaag_?"
The Kafir shrugged his shoulders.
"We did it between us, Baas," he said, and the answer moved Wyvern the
more to let him down easy, though fully alive to the bad policy of doing
so, for he appreciated the fact that the fellow had not tried to save
himself by throwing the blame on his accomplice.
They had reached the place where Wyvern had left his horse, and now as
he mounted he said:
"Now walk on in front of me, Sixpence. I shall think seriously over
what I shall do about you. You would get ever so many years in the
_tronk_ you know, for coming at me with the knife--and that apart from
what you'd get for `slaag-ing' the sheep. I expect the other fellow is
dead by this time. The snake struck him again and again."
"_Nkose_!" murmured the Kafir deprecatorily, then relapsed into silence.
Before they had gone far Wyvern said:
"Go back to your flock, Sixpence. I expect it has straggled a good bit
by this time. But--" impressively--"don't attempt to run away. You are
sure to be caught if you do, and then you will have thrown away your
last chance."
"_Nkose_!" murmured the Kafir again, and bending down he kissed his
master's foot as it rested in the stirrup. Then he walked away.
"Poor devil," said Wyvern to himself, gazing after him as he rode on.
"Well, we are all poor devils--I the most of the lot. I believe I could
almost bring myself to envy that ochre-smeared scion of Xosa. He
doesn't need much, and gets it all, while I--?"