As it was he was buffeted between two forces he did not realise, even when they swayed him, and thus at every step in his path towards a supremacy of evil an unseen power made stumbling-blocks of weaknesses which, if that path had been laid along a little higher or a little lower level in the scale of circumstances, would themselves have been deadly weapons of overmastering force.
See him as, with his dark heart filled up with fears, he thunders along from that scene of midnight death and murder which his brain had not feared to plan and his hand to execute.

Onward his black horse strides, companioned by the storm, like a dark thought travelling on the wings of Night.

He does not believe in any God, and yet the terrible fears that spring up in his soul, born fungus-like from a few drops of blood, take shape and form, and seem to cry aloud, "_We are the messengers of the avenging God_." He glances up.

High on the black bosom of the storm the finger of the lightning is writing that awful name, and again and again the voice of the thunder reads it aloud in spirit-shaking accents.

He shuts his dazed eyes, and even the falling rhythm of his horse's hoofs beats out, "_There is a God! there is a God!_" from the silent earth on which they strike.
And so, on through the tempest and the night, flying from that which no man can leave behind.
It was near midnight when Frank Muller drew rein at a wretched and lonely mud hut built on the banks of the Vaal, and flanked by an equally miserable shed.