“Yes, Baas,” answered Hans doubtfully and in jerks.  “This is very good camel, Baas.  He runs so fast that I have no inside left, I suppose because he smells his wife over that river, to say nothing of death behind him.  But, Baas, I am not sure; that devil Jana is still faster than the camel, and he wants to settle for his lost eye, which makes him lively.  Also I see stones ahead, which are bad for camels.  Then there is the river, and I don’t know if camels can swim, but Jana can as Marut learned.  Do you think, Baas, that you could manage to sting him up with a bullet in his knee or that great trunk of his, just to give him something to think about besides ourselves?”

Thus he prattled on, I believe to occupy my mind and his own, till at length, growing impatient, I replied: 

“Be silent, donkey.  Can I shoot an elephant backwards over my shoulder with a rifle meant for springbuck?  Hit the camel!  Hit it hard!”

Alas!  Hans was right!  There were stones at the verge of the river, which doubtless it had washed out in periods of past flood, and presently we were among them.  Now a camel, so good on sand that is its native heath, is a worthless brute among stones, over which it slips and flounders.  But to Jana these appeared to offer little or no obstacle.  At any rate he came over them almost if not quite as fast as before.  By the time that we reached the brink of the water he was not more than ten yards behind.  I could even see the blood running down from the socket of his ruined eye.

Moreover, at the sight of the foaming but shallow torrent, the camel, a creature unaccustomed to water, pulled up in a mulish kind of way and for a moment refused to stir.  Luckily at this instant Jana let off one of his archangel kind of trumpetings which started our beast again, since it was more afraid of elephants than it was of water.

In we went and were presently floundering among the loose stones at the bottom of the river, which was nowhere over four feet deep, with Jana splashing after us not more than five yards behind.  I twisted myself round and fired at him with the rifle.  Whether I hit him or no I could not say, but he stopped for a few seconds, perhaps because he remembered the effect of a similar explosion upon his eye, which gave us a trifling start.  Then he came on again in his steam-engine fashion.

When we were about in the middle of the river the inevitable happened.  The camel fell, pitching us over its head into the stream.  Still clinging to the rifle I picked myself up and began half to swim half to wade towards the farther shore, catching hold of Hans with my free hand.  In a moment Jana was on to that camel.  He gored it with his tusks, he trampled it with his feet, he got it round the neck with his trunk, dragging nearly the whole bulk of it out of the water.  Then he set to work to pound it down into the mud and stones at the bottom of the river with such a persistent thoroughness, that he gave us time to reach the other bank and climb up a stout tree which grew there, a sloping, flat-topped kind of tree that was fortunately easy to ascend, at least for a man.  Here we sat gasping, perhaps about thirty feet above the ground level, and waited.