'Tween Snow and Fire: A Tale of the Last Kafir War

In the midst of the savage throng was another white man, also a prisoner, who had been forced to assist at the barbarous scene just detailed. His lot, however, had been cast in...

To convey anything like an adequate idea of what followed is well-nigh impossible. The stunning, deafening roar of the volley in that narrow space was as though the very earth h...

She realised it at length--realised that this was no visitant from the spirit-world conjured up in answer to her impassioned prayer, but her lover himself, alive and unharmed. S...

"N-no. Rather the reverse if anything," and his features cleared up as if to bear out the truth of his words. "I don't see, though, why you shouldn't know it. That's the man we...

They stood there, turned to stone. They stood there, strong men as they were, their flesh creeping with horror. The awful sound was succeeded by a moment of silence, then it bur...

Pondering over what the old Kafir had said, Eustace busied himself over two or three odd jobs. Then, returning to the storeroom, he filled up a large measure of mealies and went...

There was just this much to bear out the ill-natured comments of the scandal-mongers, in that the re-appearance of the missing cousin had gone very far towards consoling the you...

Three days later Carhayes arrived. He was in high spirits. The remainder of his stock was under way, and, in charge of Eustace, was trekking steadily down to his other farm in t...

One afternoon Eanswyth managed to steal away for a solitary ramble unperceived. In the joy of having actually succeeded, she had wandered some little distance from the settlemen...

"Well, old girl, and how have you been getting through the day," was Carhayes' unceremonious greeting as he slid from his horse. Eustace turned away his head, and the faintest s...

It was stark lunacy, they declared. She to go to live on an out-of-the-way farm, alone! There was not even a neighbour for pretty near a score of miles, all the surrounding stoc...

The cry was taken up. The bloodthirsty shout rolled through the ranks fiercer and fiercer till the wild roaring chorus was deafening. That crouching, armed multitude, a moment b...

"Heavens! What a glorious thing is the light of day!" exclaimed Hoste, looking around as if he never expected to behold that blessing again, instead of having just been restored...

He saw around him an open clearing, a large natural amphitheatre, surrounded by dense forest on three sides, the fourth being constituted by a line of jagged rocks more or less...

"You ought to consider yourself uncommonly fortunate, Milne," said Hoste, as the two men drew near Anta's Kloof. "You are the only one of the lot of us not burnt out."

It is dark as Erebus--dark as it can only be an hour or so before daybreak. The camp-fires have long since gone out and it is raining heavily. The speaker, stooping down, puts h...

There was rejoicing in many households when it became known in Komgha that the Kaffrarian Rangers had been ordered home, but in none was it greater than in that run conjointly b...

Over the brow of the high ridge, about a mile in their rear, a dark mass was advancing. It was like a disturbed ants' nest--on they came, those dark forms, swarming over the hil...

When Eustace Milne fell from his saddle to the earth, the savage who had stabbed him, and who was about to follow up the blow, started back with a loud shout of astonishment and...

"What are they really doing over there, do you suppose, Eustace?" said Eanswyth anxiously, as they regained the house. The thunder of the wild war-dance floated across the inter...

The dog is some fifty yards behind the buck. The Kafir is about the same distance behind the dog, which distance he is striving right manfully to maintain; not so unsuccessfully...

The war was nearly over now. Struck on all sides--decimated by the terrible breech-loading weapons of the whites--harried even in their wildest strongholds, their supplies runni...

The party in the Cape cart were returning from a drive out to Draaibosch, a roadside inn and canteen some ten or a dozen miles along the King Williamstown road. Two troops of Ho...

A grim, massive face, a pair of fierce, rolling eyes, which seemed to sparkle with a cruel and blood thirsty scintillation, a large, strongly built trunk, whose conformation alo...

Eustace had plenty to occupy his thoughts during his homeward ride. The emphatic warning of the Gaika chief was not to be set aside lightly. That Ncanduku knew more than he chos...

The Kafirs, with their spoil, had disappeared, and on the pursuers gaining the ridge, there seemed, as Hoste had suggested, a pretty good chance of losing them altogether; for t...

The settlement of Komgha--called after an infinitesimal stream of that name--was, like most frontier townships, an utterly insignificant place. It consisted of a few straggling...

For the first forty yards the roof of the cave was so low that they had to advance in a stooping posture. Then it heightened and the tunnel widened out simultaneously. Eustace l...

Nature is rarely sympathetic. The day dawned, fair and lovely, upon the night of terror and brooding peril. A few golden rays, darting horizontally upon the green, undulating sl...

Throughout the night their march continued. Towards dawn, however, a short halt was made, to no one more welcome than to the captive himself; the fact being that poor Eustace wa...

Eager at the prospect of a brush, their appetites for which had been whetted by what had just occurred, they resumed their way in the best of spirits, and at length fixing upon...

The brooding, oppressive stillness deepened. Not a breath of air stirred the sprays of the bush, which slept motionless as though carved in stone. Even the very bird voices were...

The state of excitement prevailing in Komgha during the period of hostilities within the Transkei, was as nothing to that which prevailed now that the tide of war was rolling ar...

Anta's Kloof--such was the name of Tom Carhayes' farm--was situated on the very edge of the Gaika location. This was unfortunate, because its owner got on but poorly with his ba...

"Don't do anything so foolish, Tom," said a voice at his side, and a hand was stretched out as though to arrest the aim of the threatening piece. "For God's sake, remember. We a...

Suddenly, as if by magic, the wild war-dance ceased, and the fierce, murderous rhythm was reduced to silence. Sinking down in a half-sitting posture, quivering with suppressed e...

It may not here be out of place to offer a word of explanation as to the extraordinarily cordial relations existing between Eustace Milne and his barbarian neighbours. A student...

For upwards of two hours they forced their way through the thick scrub, but success did not crown their efforts--did not even wait upon the same. Once or twice a rustle and a sc...

Eustace and the overseer were sitting on the _stoep_ smoking a final pipe together before going to bed. It was getting on for midnight and, save these two, the household had lon...

Swaanepoel's Hoek, poor Tom Carhayes' other farm, was situated in the division of Somerset East, somewhere between the Great and Little Fish Rivers. It was rather an out-of-the-...

Suddenly a tremendous volley crashed forth from the hillside on their left front, followed immediately by another on the right. For a moment the men looked at each other in sile...

The sun has just touched the western horizon, bathing in a parting flood of red and gold the round spurs of the rolling hills and the straggling clusters of dome-shaped huts whi...

To be strictly accurate, that redoubtable corps had applied to be withdrawn. There was not enough to do to render it worth the while of the men who composed it--men mostly with...

The first numbing shock of the fearful news over, a period of even greater agony supervened. He who had succeeded in setting free the wholly unsuspected volcanic fires of her st...

There was no postal delivery at Swaanepoel's Hoek, nor was there any regular day for sending for the mails. If anybody was driving or riding into Somerset East on business or pl...

Every eye was bent upon the new arrival. With a quick, instinctive movement the savages closed around the foolhardy Englishman. There was a scowl of deadly import upon each grim...

Not so much the heat as an extraordinary closeness and sense of oppression in the atmosphere. As the sun rose, mounting higher and higher into the clear blue of the heavens, it...

Ring we the curtain down--for our tale is ended and we have no desire to point a moral thereto. Years have gone by, and new homesteads have risen upon the ashes of the old ones;...

"I've known that sort of thing happen more than once," said Shelton, the leader of the party, an experienced frontiersman who had served in two previous wars. "Same thing in buc...