In a tremble of exhaustion Shiminya sank to the ground. The cold dews of death were upon his face. The awful coldness throughout his frame, the result of a prodigious loss of blood, became an agony. Air! A great craving for air was upon him. His brain reeled, and his lungs gasped. He felt as though he could no longer move. Then the door was darkened, and something brushed in. With a superhuman effort he collected his energies. "Hamba, Lupiswana!" he gurgled. "Hamba-ke!" But the brute took no notice of the voice before which it was wont to cower and tremble. It crouched, snarling. Then it put its head down and licked the blood-gouts which had fallen upon the ground from the veins of its evil master. The latter began to experience some of the agonies he had delighted to witness in his victims. The savage beast had tasted blood--his blood. And he himself was too weak to have resisted the onslaught of a rat. Again he called, trying to infuse strength into his voice. But the crafty beast knew his state exactly, it had learnt to gauge helplessness in the case of too many other victims, perhaps. It only crawled a little nearer, still growling. For a while they lay thus, man and beast, mutually eyeing each other. The eyes of the former were becoming glazed with the agony of utter weakness but active apprehension. Those of the latter glared yellow and baleful in the semi-gloom of the hut. It was a horrid sight. "Hamba, Lupiswana!" repeated the sorcerer, instinctively groping for a weapon. But with a shrill snarl the brute was at his throat, tearing and worrying, and, although a small animal, so furious was its frenzy over this new and copious feast of blood, that it shook the light form of the wizard, almost as it would have done that of a newly dropped fawn. And then in the semi-gloom was the horrible spectacle of a man with his throat half torn out, feebly battling with the enraged furious beast covered with blood and uttering its guttural snarls, as it tore and clawed at his already lacerated vitals. But the struggle did not last. The grim "familiar spirit" had triumphed over its evil master. Shiminya the sorcerer lay dead in his _muti_ kraal, and the horrible brute lay growling and snarling as it gorged itself to repletion upon his mangled body. And Nanzicele? Exultant, yet somewhat fearing, he decamped with his booty; but he did not get far. A dizziness and griping pain was upon him, and he sank down in the river-bed, by a water-hole. What was it? His wound was slight. Ha! The knife! Yes. A greenish froth was on the surface of his wound. The knife was poisoned.