Thus adjured, the little Hottentot, smothered as he was in blood, stood up.  In the simple, dramatic style characteristic of his race, he narrated all that had happened since he met the woman on the veld but little over twelve hours before, till the arrival of the rescue party.  Never have I seen a tale followed with deeper interest, and when at last Hans pointed to me lying on the ground and said, “There is he who did these things which it might be thought no man could do—­he, but a boy,” even from those phlegmatic Dutchmen there came a general cheer.  But, lifting myself upon my hands, I called out: 

“Whatever I did, this poor Hottentot did also, and had it not been for him I could not have done anything—­for him and the two good horses.”

Then they cheered again, and Marie, rising, said: 

“Yes, father; to these two I owe my life.”

After this, my father offered his prayer of thanksgiving in very bad Dutch—­for, having begun to learn it late in life, he never could really master that language—­and the stalwart Boers, kneeling round him, said “Amen.”  As the reader may imagine, the scene, with all its details, which I will not repeat, was both remarkable and impressive.

What followed this prayer I do not very well remember, for I became faint from exhaustion and the loss of blood.  I believe, however, that the fire having been extinguished, they removed the dead and wounded from the unburnt portion of the house and carried me into the little room where Marie and I had gone through that dreadful scene when I went within an ace of killing her.  After this the Boers and Marais’s Kaffirs, or rather slaves, whom he had collected from where they lived away from the house, to the number of thirty or forty, started to follow the defeated Quabie, leaving about ten of their number as a guard.  Here I may mention that of the seven or eight men who slept in the outbuildings and had fought with us, two were killed in the fight and two wounded.  The remainder, one way or another, managed to escape unhurt, so that in all this fearful struggle, in which we inflicted so terrible a punishment upon the Kaffirs, we lost only three slain, including the Frenchman, Leblanc.

As to the events of the next three days I know only what I have been told, for practically during all that time I was off my head from loss of blood, complicated with fever brought on by the fearful excitement and exertion I had undergone.  All I can recall is a vision of Marie bending over me and making me take food of some sort—­milk or soup, I suppose—­for it seems I would touch it from no other hand.  Also I had visions of the tall shape of my white-haired father, who, like most missionaries, understood something of surgery and medicine, attending to the bandages on my thigh.  Afterwards he told me that the spear had actually cut the walls of the big artery, but, by good fortune, without going through them.  Another fortieth of an inch and I should have bled to death in ten minutes!