I reached the stone enclosure, and passed up through the flower-garden.  To my great surprise, Hilda was not there.  As a rule, she came to meet me, with her sunny smile.  But perhaps she was tired, or the sun on the road might have given her a headache.  I dismounted from my mare, and called one of the Kaffir boys to take her to the stable.  Nobody answered. . . .  I called again.  Still silence. . . .  I tied her up to the post, and strode over to the door, astonished at the solitude.  I began to feel there was something weird and uncanny about this home-coming.  Never before had I known Klaas’s so entirely deserted.

I lifted the latch and opened the door.  It gave access at once to the single plain living-room.  There, all was huddled.  For a moment my eyes hardly took in the truth.  There are sights so sickening that the brain at the first shock wholly fails to realise them.

On the stone slab floor of the low living-room Tant Mettie lay dead.  Her body was pierced through by innumerable thrusts, which I somehow instinctively recognised as assegai wounds.  By her side lay Sannie, the little prattling girl of three, my constant playmate, whom I had instructed in cat’s-cradle, and taught the tales of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood.  My hand grasped the lollipops in my pocket convulsively.  She would never need them.  Nobody else was about.  What had become of Oom Jan Willem—­and the baby?

I wandered out into the yard, sick with the sight I had already seen.  There Oom Jan Willem himself lay stretched at full length; a bullet had pierced his left temple; his body was also riddled through with assegai thrusts.

I saw at once what this meant.  A rising of the Matabele!

I had come back from Salisbury, unknowing it, into the midst of a revolt of bloodthirsty savages.

Yet, even if I had known, I must still have hurried home with all speed to Klaas’s—­to protect Hilda.

Hilda?  Where was Hilda?  A breathless sinking crept over me.

I staggered out into the open.  It was impossible to say what horror might not have happened.  The Matabele might even now be lurking about the kraal—­for the bodies were hardly cold.  But Hilda?  Hilda?  Whatever came, I must find Hilda.

Fortunately, I had my loaded revolver in my belt.  Though we had not in the least anticipated this sudden revolt—­it broke like a thunder-clap from a clear sky—­the unsettled state of the country made even women go armed about their daily avocations.

I strode on, half maddened.  Beside the great block of granite which sheltered the farm there rose one of those rocky little hillocks of loose boulders which are locally known in South Africa by the Dutch name of kopjes.  I looked out upon it drearily.  Its round brown ironstones lay piled irregularly together, almost as if placed there in some earlier age by the mighty hands of prehistoric giants.  My gaze on it was blank.  I was thinking, not of it, but of Hilda, Hilda.