Suddenly the Vilderbeeste's horse put his foot into an ant-bear hole and fell heavily, throwing his rider on to his head.

He was up in a minute, but his forehead had struck against the jawbone of a dead buck, and the blood was pouring from it down his hairy face.

His companion laughed brutally at the accident, for there are some natures in the world to which the sight of pain is irresistibly comical, but the injured man cursed aloud, trying to staunch the flow with the lappet of his coat.
"_Waacht een beeche_," said Jess, "there is some water in that pool," and telling John to pull up she sprang from the trap and led the man, who was half-blinded with blood, to the spring.

Here she made him kneel down and bathed the wound, which was not a very deep one, till it stopped bleeding, and then, having first placed a pad of cotton-wool, some of which she happened to have in the cart, upon it, she bound her handkerchief tightly round his head.

The man, brute as he was, appeared to be much touched at her kindness.
"Almighty," he said, "but you have a kind heart and soft fingers; my own wife could not have done it better; it is a pity that you are a damned Englishwoman." Jess climbed back into the cart, making no reply, and they started on, the Vilderbeeste looking more savage and unhuman than ever with the discoloured handkerchief round his head, and his dense black beard and hair mattered with gore which he would not take the trouble to wash out of them.
After this nothing further occurred till, by the orders of their escort, they outspanned, an hour or so before sunset, at a spot in the veldt where a faint track forked from the Standerton road..