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"Mount, Swallow," said Sihamba, seizing the head of the great schimmel. Suzanne set her foot upon the shoulder of Zinti, who knelt to receive it, and sprang into the saddle. Then having lifted Sihamba on the grey mare Zinti mounted the other horse himself, holding the mule by a leading riem. "Which way, mistress?" he asked. "Homewards," she answered, and they cantered forward through the wood.
Next, Sihamba slipped off her fur cloak, leaving herself naked except for the moocha round her middle, and, clasping her hands behind her back with the assegai between them, she drew the riem taut, and leaned against the wall of the hut after the fashion of one who is about to be pulled from the ground and strangled. "Now, mistress, listen to me," she said earnestly.
Then she closed her eyes as though to shut out the sight of his face, and sat silent, saying nothing and doing nothing, even when Piet and the other man who supported her had mounted and pushed their horses to a gallop, leading that on which she rode by a riem.
At last, when the fire was blazing at its brightest, he rose suddenly and walked slowly to a beam from which an ox riem hung. Loosening it, he ran a noose in one end and then doubled it round his arm. "Mine, mine! I have a right," he muttered; and then something louder, "if I fall and am killed, so much the better!" He opened the door and went out into the starlight.
Bonaparte started and looked up. No riem or strap, hung down from the rafters above, and not a human creature was near the door. It was growing dark; he did not like it. He began to fold up the papers expeditiously. He stretched out his hand for the ring. The ring was gone! Gone, although no human creature had entered the room; gone, although no form had crossed the doorway. Gone!
He made the fellows tie him up to that little tree before his tent, with riems round his legs, and riems round his waist, and a riem round his neck." "What did the native say?" asked the Englishman. "Oh, he didn't say anything. There wasn't a soul in the camp could have understood him if he had. The coloured boys don't know his language.
Those stars that shone on up above so quietly, they had seen a thousand such little existences fight just so fiercely, flare up just so brightly and go out; and they, the old, old stars, shone on forever. "So hot, so angry, poor little soul?" they said. The riem slipped from his fingers; he sat with his arms folded, looking up. "We," said the stars, "have seen the earth when it was young.
They have trekked back along the Middelburg Road, and are a dozen miles off by now, I'll be bound. Now, no words; go, both of you. "Tom, the driver, swore and caught the lad a hearty kick, which he richly deserved, and then, having tied old Kaptein up to the disselboom with a riem, they took their assegais and sticks, and started.
Either by chance or design Anscombe's horse was struck in the neck and fell struggling, whereon my beast, growing frightened, broke its riem and galloped to the wagon. That is where I ought to have left them at first, only I thought that we might need them to make a bolt on, or to carry Anscombe if he could not walk.
"God forgive him for that lie," thought I to myself as, having tightened the girths, I mounted my mare. Then gripping the riem I kicked the beast to a canter, Anscombe flogging up the team as we swung down the bank to the edge of the foaming torrent, on the further side of which the Swazis shouted and gesticulated to us to go back.
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