While we were eating they jumped upon our backs.

Rod got that--and lost his rifle!" Mukoki quickly stripped the wounded boy of his garments, baring his left arm and side.

The arm was swollen and almost black and there was a great bruise on Rod's body a little above the waist.

Mukoki was a surgeon by necessity, a physician such as one finds only in the vast unblazed wildernesses, where Nature is the teacher.

Crudely he made his examination, pinching and twisting the flesh and bones until Rod cried out in pain, but in the end there was a glad triumph in his voice as he said: "No bone broke--hurt most here!" and he touched the bruise.