After this, the three pushed forward night after night, and in the course of a few days, the heavy clouds that had veiled the horizon cleared off, and they found themselves within a few hours' journey of the Stormberg Mountains. Gray's narration of the events which had been the cause of his leaving Umlala's Kraal did not particularly move Lyle or Doda; if the latter had any suspicion of the deserter's regard for his daughter, he did not betray it. Until a Kafir is excited by incidents passing before him, he never displays any decided emotion; hating Amani, he was more inclined to be enraged with him for his condemnation of Amayeka, than anxious for his daughter's fate. In the hands of white men, he felt certain enough of her safety to take the matter coolly, suggesting that he was now among the Boers in the Stormberg; and, under this impression, he tramped steadily on, staff in hand, and, with a loose assegai, ready to bring down any game that might cross the path. Lyle, on learning the destruction of the ammunition, congratulated himself on having settled all monetary transactions ere he started. The articles of barter exchanged by the Kafirs for the gunpowder were all well on their way to the Witches' Krantz, and the only point now on which he was ill at ease, was Gray's faint-heartedness, as he termed it. "What would you do?" said Lyle, as, side by side, the two Englishmen followed Doda through the tangled pathways intersecting the small plains, covered with fine pasturage, and watered by numerous streams proceeding from the Stormberg,--"what would you do? declare yourself a runaway convict, a deserter from the Royal Artillery? My good fellow, you are the man the Boers want--they have got guns, as you know, but few to handle them--you will meet some old comrades, though, I have no doubt, up in those hills." Then Gray spoke the first resolute words he had uttered for a long time. "If," said he, "you think I will work a gun against my own countrymen, you are mistaken. You may call me fool, coward, if you will--I may be branded, shot as a deserter but I will not die a traitor!"