Poeskop delayed no longer. The madness of revenge ran seething through his veins. Whipping out his long hunting knife from its sheath, he hacked with desperate energy at the tough hide of the ladder. One side went, the ladder drooped and collapsed, and the Boer hung helpless and awry by the frail support of the other side only.
"Die! die! die! you schelm!" gasped Poeskop, his voice shrill with passion, as he shore and hacked for the last three times at the raw hide. With the final frantic stroke the remaining strand went, and with it the whole ladder and its burden. From a height of three hundred feet Karl Engelbrecht fell to the bottom of the cliff. Thrice he turned over in mid-air; then, with a sickening thud, his huge frame struck the hard earth, within a few feet of his startled Hottentot. That terrific fall reduced the giant upon the instant to little more than a hideous pulp of broken bones, blood, and pounded flesh; and from the moment of the impact, the Boer neither breathed nor stirred again.
The report of Engelbrecht's rifle shot had at once roused the attention of the gold-diggers at the head of the kloof; and although the final catastrophe had overtaken the Boer before they had extricated themselves from some bush behind which they were working, they were all three instantly aware that something was happening in the neighbourhood of the upper camp.
"Come, lads," said Mr. Blakeney, "we must be off. I don't know what's up, but there's some mischief brewing, I'm certain."
At once they set off at a steady trot towards the rope-ladder. They had traversed some six hundred yards, and emerged from a small grove of thorn trees about three hundred yards from the ladder foot, when an exclamation from Guy suddenly brought them to a halt.
"Look!" he cried. "There's some one--Poeskop, I believe--at the top of the cliff; and, by Jove, the ladder's gone!"
Mr. Blakeney and Tom stared hard at the cliff top, and saw at once that Guy's assertion was right. Poeskop it was, gesticulating at the summit of the precipice, and the ladder had vanished.
"There's something very wrong here," exclaimed Mr. Blakeney. "Come on!"
They were not long in covering the last three hundred yards that separated them from the foot of the cliff, and there a strange and tragic scene awaited them.