whispering at his ear. It reminded him that he, the white _Inkoos_, had
been refused by this dusky beauty, and that if he found a way to save
him, within some few hours she would be the wife of the savage gentleman
at her side, the man who had named him Black Heart and who despised
him, the man whom he had meant to murder and who immediately repaid his
treachery by rescuing him from the jaws of the leopard at the risk of
his own life. Moreover, it was a law of Hadden's existence never to deny
himself of anything that he desired if it lay within his power to take
it--a law which had led him always deeper into sin. In other respects,
indeed, it had not carried him far, for in the past he had not desired
much, and he had won little; but this particular flower was to his hand,
and he would pluck it. If Nahoon stood between him and the flower, so
much the worse for Nahoon, and if it should wither in his grasp, so much
the worse for the flower; it could always be thrown away. Thus it came
about that, not for the first time in his life, Philip Hadden discarded
the somewhat spasmodic prickings of conscience and listened to that evil
whispering at his ear.

About half-past five o'clock in the afternoon the four refugees passed
the stream that a mile or so down fell over the little precipice into
the Doom Pool; and, entering a patch of thorn trees on the further side,
walked straight into the midst of two-and-twenty soldiers, who were
beguiling the tedium of expectancy by the taking of snuff and the
smoking of _dakka_ or native hemp. With these soldiers, seated on his
pony, for he was too fat to walk, waited the Chief Maputa.

Observing that their expected guests had arrived, the men knocked out
the _dakka_ pipe, replaced the snuff boxes in the slits made in the
lobes of their ears, and secured the four of them.