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.