John Ames, Native Commissioner: A Romance of the Matabele Rising

For the line of bush was alive with gleaming forms, as fully a hundred warriors darted out, making straight for the store; not in a compact body, but in a scattered line; not er...

The former accounted for the latter inasmuch as it was the direct cause thereof. In cold official terminology it regretted the necessity of abridging the period of his leave, an...

Nidia's sleep had been dreamless and profound, wherefore when she awoke the next morning she felt rested and refreshed. A shudder of repulsion ran: through her as her gaze made...

"Well, good-bye, Moseley. Pity you're in such a hurry; you might just as well have stayed the night. However, since you're determined, you'd better not ride too slow. It'll take...

Thus Moseley, surveyor, to Tarrant, ditto. The campfire had gone out during the small hours, and the line of action enjoined upon the latter by his chum was not a congenial one,...

"Well, to tell the truth, I do. It's not a good plan to remain too long in the same place. My notion is to work our way gradually to the northern edge of the range, where we can...

Shiminya resumed his seat upon the ground, with the _muti_ bowl in his hands. The wolf he had already secured in one of the huts. The grim beast was in truth his familiar spirit...

Nidia stared at the savage, her eyes dilated with the wildest dismay. The savage, for his part, stared at her, with a countenance which expressed but little less astonishment th...

When John Ames at last returned to consciousness, the first thought to take definite shape was that he was dead. There was a rock ceiling overhead. He had been dragged into a ca...

In the morning, peace, tranquillity, security; in the evening, violence, bloodshed, death--such is the sort of contrast that life seems to enjoy affording, especially life in a...

John Ames stared at this communication till his eyes were dizzy, and a wild rush of joy surged through his being. Its genuineness he could not doubt. The bank paper, the bank se...

Thus Mrs Inglefield, consulting her watch. She was an acid looking person, who might once have been passable in aspect. Now the deepening of her habitual frown was far from prep...

Reduced to existence in its most primitive state, it followed that the means of sustaining such existence were perforce primitive, and, foreseeing this, John Ames had managed, d...

Madula's kraal, in the Sikumbutana, was again in a state of profound malcontentment and unrest, and again for much the same reason as before. Then that reason had been the immin...

His mind aglow with the recollection of that farewell, his one thought how soon he should be able to return, John Ames strode forth upon his quest, and as he did so it is probab...

There can be no doubt but that, during the period of the rising, and especially during the earlier half of the same, the township of Bulawayo was a very uncomfortable place indeed.

"Do you know, this place reminds me a little of our resting ground that day down among the rocks at Camp's Bay," Nidia said, gazing up at the gigantic boulder, which, piled obli...

The mail-steamer from England had been docked early in Cape Town, and the tables at lunch-time, in the dining room of Cogill's Hotel at Wynberg, were quite full. There is someth...

When he awoke, John Ames found himself in the dark; not the ordinary darkness of night, wherein objects are faintly outlined, but black, pitchy, impenetrable gloom--an outer dar...

Now, the area of the said district contained about as many square miles as did one half of England. It likewise contained some thousands of its original inhabitants, a considera...

Only a vast upheaval--whether through the agency of fire or of water, let the geologists determine and quarrel over--can have produced such a bizarre result. A very sea of grani...

The aspect of the two natives into whose power she had fallen was not such as to inspire Nidia with any great degree of reassurance. They formed an evil-looking pair; the tall o...

With her usual frank naturalness and absence of conventionality, Nidia went to meet him in the doorway. Then, as he took her extended hands, it seemed as though he were going to...

At first he had done so in a negative kind of way. It was pleasant to have nothing to do, and plenty of time to do it in, to rise in the morning and know that until bedtime at n...

Susie Bateman looked at the girl as she sat there, with hands clasped together and downcast eyes, striving to look the very picture of be-lectured demureness, and tried to feel...

Jekyll's Store, near Malengwa, was an institution of considerable importance in its way, for there not only did prospectors and travellers and settlers replenish their supplies,...

This kraal was situated in the heart of a vast thicket of "wait-a-bit" thorns. It was enclosed by a closely woven fence of the same redoubtable growth, whose height and bristlin...

MacFurdon's troop, about two hundred strong, was sweeping up the long slope which ran northward from the township of Bulawayo, and the line it was taking would bring it out a li...

The kraal, a large one, surrounded by an oval ring-fence of thorn, contained some seventy or eighty huts. Three or four smaller kraals were dotted around within a mile of it, an...

Golden August--a sky of cloudless blue softening into the autumn haze which dims the horizon; golden August, with the whirr of the reaping-machine, as the yellow wheat falls to...