And, in very sooth, Poeskop had reason for uneasiness. Karl Engelbrecht was not yet done with his revenge. After retiring beaten from the attack on the English camp, he had trekked out of the mountains, and outspanned with the remnant of his Boer allies some ten miles away. There, after mutual recriminations, the two parties split up, and the filibusters who had joined forces with him, disgusted with their losses and their ill-success, moved away for the coast. Engelbrecht himself, as had been observed by Poeskop, had trekked northward into unknown veldt. But the Boer, although he had betaken himself beyond the ken of the gold-seekers, had by no means abated one jot or tittle of the fierce anger and hatred that had for so long possessed him. In a few days he had recovered from the flesh wound sustained in the attack on the English camp. During these days of enforced quiet his mind, still consumed by an overpowering passion for revenge, turned over incessantly murderous plans against the men who had so lately defeated him. If, by some means, he could gain the gold valley and lie in ambush, he might surely, he thought to himself, with the aid of his henchman Quasip, a notably good shot, dispose of two of the most hated of his rivals without much difficulty. Poeskop and the man Blakeney should fall to their first two barrels, and they could surely manage the two lads thereafter. There were risks, it was true--risks which, in his calmer moments, he would have weighed in the balance many times before accepting; but in his present frame of mind the man saw red and nothing else. Revenge called him loudly back to the Gold Kloof; and go he must. Somehow or other he would find means of compassing the destruction of his foes. Taking with him his Hottentot Quasip, and accompanied by a native after-rider mounted on a spare horse, Karl Engelbrecht then rode back for the mountains surrounding the Gold Kloof. He had with him a fortnight’s supply of biltong and other necessaries, but he reckoned upon accomplishing his designs within a week. They approached the mountains by a narrow ravine some miles to the right of the main valley by which the gold-finders had found their way into the hills. By this means Engelbrecht hoped to escape any scouting observations made by the English party. From this ravine the after-rider, Klaas, was sent back with the three horses to Engelbrecht’s outspan, two days distant, with minute instructions to return to the same place seven days thence.