“Who with?”

“Mr. Barrington,” the boy told him, and added, “It is his wagon-track which we have been following.”

Norris rose from the ground, and walked straight ahead for the distance of a hundred yards until he reached a jasmine bush, which stood in a bee-line with the opening of his camp fence.  Thence he moved round in a semicircle until he came upon a wagon-track in the rear of the camp, and, after pausing there, he went forward again, and completed the circle.  He returned to his wagon chuckling.  Barrington, he remembered, had been lost while travelling northwards to the Zambesie; but the track stopped here.  There was not a trace of it to the north or the east or the west.  It was evident that the boy had chosen Barrington’s last camping-ground as the site for his own, and he discovered a comforting irony in the fact.  He felt that he was standing in Barrington’s shoes.

That night, as he was smoking by the fire, he called out to the Ma-ongwi boy.  The lad came forward from his hut behind the wagon.

“Tell me how you lost him,” said Norris.

“He rode that way alone after a sable antelope.”  The boy pointed an arm to the southwest.  “The beast was wounded, and we followed its blood-spoor.  We found Mr. Barrington’s horse gored by the antelope’s horns.  He himself had gone forward on foot.  We tracked him to a little stream, but the opposite bank was trampled, and we lost all sign of him.”  This is what the boy said though his language is translated.

Norris remained upon this encampment for a fortnight.  Blue wildebeests, koodoos, elands, and gems-bok were plentiful, and once he got a shot at a wart-hog boar.  At the end of the fortnight he walked round the ant-heap early one morning, and of a sudden plumped down full length in the grass.  Straight in front of him he saw a herd of buffaloes moving in his direction down a glade of the forest a quarter of a mile away.  Norris cast a glance backwards; the camp was hidden from the herd by the intervening ant-heap.  He looked again towards the forest; the buffaloes advanced slowly, pasturing as they moved.  Norris crawled behind the ant-heap on his hands and knees, ran thence into the camp, buckled on a belt of cartridges, snatched up a 450-bore Metford rifle, and got back to his position just as the first of the herd stepped into the open.  It turned to the right along the edge of the wood, and the others followed in file.  Norris wriggled forward through the grass, and selecting a fat bull in the centre of the line, aimed behind its shoulder and fired.  The herd stampeded into the forest, the bull fell in its tracks.