Pale and terrified, Eanswyth hurried away, and Carhayes, who had thrown himself on the sofa, proceeded growlingly to give an account of the rough usage he had been subjected to. He must have been stealthily followed, he said, for about half an hour after leaving Nteya's kraal he had been set upon in the darkness by a party of Kafirs. So sudden was the assault that they had succeeded in snatching his gun away from him before he could use it. A blow on the head with a kerrie--a whack which would have floored a weaker man--he parenthesised grimly and with ill-concealed pride--having failed to knock him off his horse, the savages endeavoured to stab him with their assegais--and in fact had wounded him in several places. Fortunately for him they had not succeeded in seizing his bridle, or at any rate in retaining hold of it, or his doom would have been sealed. "The chap who tried it on dropped under my stirrup-iron," explained Carhayes. "I `downed' him, by the living Jingo! He'll never kick again, I do believe. That scoundrel Nteya promised I shouldn't be molested, the living dog! There he was, the old _schelm_, he and our friend of to-day, Hlangani--and Matanzima, old Sandili's son, and Sivulele, and a lot of them, haranguing the rest. They mean war. There couldn't have been less than six or seven hundred of them--all holding a big war-dance, got up in their feathers and fal-lals. What do you think of that, Eustace? And in I went bang into the very thick of them." "I knew it would come to this one of these days, Tom," said Eanswyth, who now reappeared with the necessary refreshment, and water and towels for dressing his wounds. "Of course you did," retorted her husband, with a savage snarl. "You wouldn't be a woman if you didn't, my dear. `I told you so,' `I _told_ you so,'--isn't that a woman's invariable parrot cry. Instead of `telling me so,' suppose you set to work and see what you can do for a fellow. Eh?" Eustace turned away to conceal the white fury that was blasting him. Why had the Kafirs done things by halves? Why had they not completed their work and rid the earth of a coarse-minded brute who simply encumbered it. From that moment he hated his cousin with a secret and bitter hatred. And this was the life that stood between him and-- Paradise. Tom Carhayes was indeed in a vile humour--not on account of the wounds he had received, ugly as some of them were; for he was not lacking in brute courage or endurance. But his wrath burnt hot against the insolent daring of his assailants, who had presumed to attack him, who had, moreover, done so treacherously, had robbed him of his gun, as well as of a number of sheep, and had added insult to injury by laughing in his face when he asked for redress.