"Poor old chap! We'll see you through all right. You'll live to talk over all this again and again," was the pitying reply of a comrade. "I don't want to; I want to be dead. Oh, it's awful--awful!" His kneebone had been shattered by a bullet, and he was enduring terrible agony. To listen to his pitiful writhings and groans was enough to take the heart out of the most daredevil glutton for fighting. "Here, have a drink, old man. It'll buck you up a bit," said another, groping towards him with a whisky bottle. "Yes. Give it here. Where is it?" And the sufferer's groans were silenced in a gasping gurgle. "Worst thing possible for him, I believe," whispered Moseley. "Shouldn't wonder," replied Tarrant also in a whisper. "Doesn't much matter, though, the poor devil! He's a `goner' anyhow. A knock like that means mortification, and there's no doctor here to take his leg off, nor could it be done under the circumstances if there was." "By the Lord, Moseley," he resumed, a moment later, "I wonder if there's anything in what Jekyll said the niggers were saying just now--that there are no whites left in the land. If this is a general outbreak, what of Hollingworth and his crowd?" An exclamation of dismay escaped the other. Their own position was so essentially one of action that they had had little or no time to take thought for any but themselves. Now it came home to them. But for the timely warning brought by the police trooper, they themselves would have been treacherously set upon and massacred; how, then, should those who had not been so warned escape? "Heavens! it won't bear thinking about," he replied. "Formerly, in the Cape wars; the Kafirs didn't kill women; at least, so I've often heard. Perhaps these don't either. Dibs, it's too awful. Let's put it to Jekyll." But the opinion of that worthy, and of two others with experience, was not cheering either. It was impossible to say what these might do. Most of the younger men of the Matabele nation were a mongrel lot, and a ruffianly withal One resolve, however, was arrived at--that if they succeeded in beating off their present assailants, they would hurry over to the aid of the Hollingworths. The night wore on, and still the enemy gave no sign of his presence. Had he cleared out, they speculated? No, that was not likely, either. The odds were too great in his favour. It was far more likely that he was waiting his chance, either that they might strive to break through his cordon and get away in the darkness--and there were some who but for the fact of having wounded men to look after would have favoured this course--or that he would make a determined rush on the position with the first glimmer of dawn.