middle of his shield, pierced it, and passed through him, and over he rolled upon the veldt.  I swung round in the saddle; most happily my horse was accustomed to standing still when I fired from his back, also he was so surprised that he did not know which way to shy.  The other savage was almost on me; his outstretched shield reached the muzzle of my gun as I pulled the trigger of the left barrel.  It exploded, the warrior sprung high into the air, and fell against my horse dead, his spear passing just in front of my face.

Without waiting to reload, or even to look if the main body of the Zulus had seen the death of their two scouts, I turned my horse and drove my heels into his sides.  As soon as I was down the slope of the rise I pulled a little to the right in order to intercept the waggons before the Zulus saw them.  I had not gone three hundred yards in this new direction when, to my utter astonishment, I struck a trail marked with waggon-wheels and the hoofs of oxen.  Of waggons there must have been at least eight, and several hundred cattle.  Moreover, they had passed within twelve hours; I could tell that by the spoor.  Then I understood; the Impi was following the track of the waggons, which, in all probability, belonged to a party of emigrant Boers.

The spoor of the waggons ran in the direction I wished to go, so I followed it.  About a mile further on I came to the crest of a rise, and there, about five furlongs away, I saw the waggons drawn up in a rough laager upon the banks of the river.  There, too, were my own waggons trekking down the slope towards them.

In another five minutes I was there.  The Boers—­for Boers they were—­were standing about outside the little laager watching the approach of my two waggons.  I called to them, and they turned and saw me.  The very first man my eyes fell on was a Boer named Hans Botha, whom I had known well years ago in the Cape.  He was not a bad specimen of his class, but a very restless person, with a great objection to authority, or, as he expressed it, “a love of freedom.”  He had joined a party of the emigrant Boers some years before, but, as I learned presently, had quarrelled with its leader, and was now trekking away into the wilderness to found a little colony of his own.  Poor fellow!  It was his last trek.

“How do you do, Meinheer Botha?” I said to him in Dutch.

The man looked at me, looked again, then, startled out of his Dutch stolidity, cried to his wife, who was seated on the box of the waggon—­

“Come here, Frau, come.  Here is Allan Quatermain, the Englishman, the son of the ‘Predicant.’  How goes it, Heer Quatermain, and what is the news down in the Cape yonder?”

“I don’t know what the news is in the Cape, Hans,” I answered, solemnly; “but the news here is that there is a Zulu Impi upon your spoor and within two miles of the waggons.  That I know, for I have just shot two of their sentries,” and I showed him my empty gun.