“Have done, my heart,” she said, pushing me away.  “I come to you from my father, who is sick in his stomach and would see you.”

“Which means that I shall have to go after your cousin alone,” I replied with indignant emphasis.

She shook her head, and led me to the little shanty in which she slept.  Here by the growing light, that entered through the doorway for it had no window, I perceived Marais seated upon a wooden stool with his hands pressed on his middle and groaning.

“Good morning, Allan,” he said in a melancholy voice; “I am ill, very ill, something that I have eaten perhaps, or a chill in the stomach, such as often precedes fever or dysentery.”

“Perhaps you will get better as you walk, mynheer,” I suggested, for, to tell the truth, I misdoubted me of this chill, and knew that he had eaten nothing but what was quite wholesome.

“Walk!  God alone knows how I can walk with something gripping my inside like a wagon-maker’s vice.  Yet I will try, for it is impossible to leave that poor Hernan to die alone; and if I do not go to seek him, it seems that no one else will.”

“Why should not some of my Kaffirs go with Klaus?” I asked.

“Allan,” he replied solemnly, “if you were dying in a cave far from help, would you think well of those who sent raw Kaffirs to succour you when they might have come themselves, Kaffirs who certainly would let you die and return with some false story?”

“I don’t know what I should think, Heer Marais.  But I do know that if I were in that cave and Pereira were in this camp, neither would he come himself, nor so much as send a savage to save me.”

“It may be so, Allan.  But even if another’s heart is black, should yours be black also?  Oh!  I will come, though it be to my death,” and, rising from the stool with the most dreadful groan, he began to divest himself of the tattered blanket in which he was wrapped up.

“Oh!  Allan, my father must not go; it will kill him,” exclaimed Marie, who took a more serious view of his case than I did.

“Very well, if you think so,” I answered.  “And now, as it is time for me to be starting, good-bye.”

“You have a good heart, Allan,” said Marais, sinking back upon his stool and resuming his blanket, while Marie looked despairingly first at one and then at the other of us.

Half an hour later I was on the road in the very worst of tempers.

“Mind what you are about,” called Vrouw Prinsloo after me.  “It is not lucky to save an enemy, and if I know anything of that stinkcat, he will bite your finger badly by way of gratitude.  Bah! lad, if I were you I should just camp for a few days in the bush, and then come back and say that I could find nothing of Pereira except the dead hyenas that had been poisoned by eating him.  Good luck to you all the same, Allan; may I find such a friend in need.  It seems to me that you were born to help others.”