“Which way shall we go?” said Hazel. “Shall we ride over to Komgha?”

“I vote we go bang in the other direction,” answered Dick Selmes. “The township’s all clatter and dust—and altogether abominable. Mrs Waybridge was an angel of light when she cropped up and dragged me out of it.”

“Yes, you wanted some dragging, didn’t you?” was the somewhat mischievous rejoinder.

“As if I knew. Good Lord! what a narrow thing it was. And there I was, cudgelling my muddy brains for some excuse, because I thought you were staying in the town.”

The two were on horseback. They had started off for an afternoon ride together, all undecided as to where they should go. But there was one place Dick Selmes was resolved they should not go to—unless Hazel particularly wanted to, and somehow he did not think she would—and that was the township. It was full of his own sex, and he wanted the girl all to himself, to-day at any rate. He had a lively recollection of the Christmas gathering which he had not enjoyed, for the reason that then he never could get her all to himself. He had voted them a set of unmitigated bores, and, rare thing indeed with him, had become almost irritable. Yet if ever any one was what is known as a “man’s man,” that was Dick Selmes. Given the absence of Hazel on that festive occasion, he would have voted them all thundering good fellows. But—circumstances alter cases.

Since the understanding of that morning, and the compact entered into between them, a more restful feeling had come over these two; a feeling as though they belonged to each other; and though some patience was needed, at any rate there was an end to uncertainty.

“We might go round by old Umjuza’s kraal and Sampson’s store,” suggested Dick, “unless you would like to look anybody up. There are the Paynes, for instance.”

“No; I don’t want to see any one. We’ll keep to the veldt.”

“Them’s my sentiments,” cried Dick, gaily, emphasising the said gaiety by a swish of his whip that caused his steed to prance and snort. His wounded arm was quite healed by now. “What a difference there is about the veldt here; no jolly old koorhaans crowing and squawking—or a buck every now and then jumping up under your feet, not even an odd pair of blue cranes. Only those silly old bromvogels, and they wouldn’t be there either, but that even John Kafir won’t eat them.”

A pair of the great black hornbills were strutting among the sparse mimosa on the opposite slope, emitting their deep, booming grunt. But although deficient in game, the veldt was fair and pleasant to the eye, with its roll of sunlit plain and round-topped hills, and if the crowing of koorhaans or the grating cackle of the wild guinea-fowl were wanting, the cooing of doves, and the triple call of the hoepoe from the bush-grown kloofs made soft music on the slumbrous calm.

“You’ll never stand English life after this, Dick.”

“Oh yes. We can always come out here again for change. There’s more variety of sport in England; in fact, there’s something going all the year round. What do you think, dear? The dad talks about putting me up for Parliament soon.”

“A very sensible plan too.”

“But I can’t spout. And I’m pretty certain I’d promise the crowd anything it asked for. Whether it would get it is another thing.”

Hazel laughed, but she there and then mentally resolved that Sir Anson’s wish should meet with fulfilment—in certain contingencies, that is.

“What a rum thing it is to feel one’s self out of leading-strings again,” went on Dick. “But I wonder when old Greenoak will turn up here and give me marching orders, like he did at Haakdoorn. I shan’t obey this time. Though, I was forgetting, I shall have to give them to myself.”

When Harley Greenoak had returned to the Komgha he laughed to himself as he learned what had become of his charge. Twice he had ridden over and spent a day or two with the Waybridges, and from what he had seen there he judged that his responsibility was nearing its end. But the fact of his charge being in such good hands had left him free to follow out the secret investigations and negotiations in which he was then engaged, and the success or failure of which, both chances being about even, would be of momentous import.

Before Hazel could reply there was a rush of dogs, and vast snarling and barking as the brutes leapt at the horses, and one or two, incidentally, at their riders. The latter on topping a rise had come upon a large kraal, whose beehive-shaped huts stood in clusters, adjoining the square, or circular, cattle or goat pens common to each.

In a moment Dick had curled the lash of his raw-hide whip round the long, lithe body of a fine, tawny, black-muzzled greyhound, which was savagely leaping at the hind quarters of the steed ridden by Hazel. With a snarling, agonised yelp the beast dropped back howling, and for a second or two the ardour of the others seemed checked. Then they came on again.

Dick now turned his horse, and charging in among them, cut right and left with his whip. The savage pack, demoralised, retired howling, and by this time the riders were right abreast of the kraal.

The latter seemed now in a ferment. The ochre-smeared figures of women—many of them with a brown human bundle on their backs—stamping mealies in a rough wooden pestle, or smoking and gossiping in groups—now got up, chattering and laughing shrilly; while the male inhabitants of the place—quite a number—came swarming out of the huts, talking volubly in their deep-toned bass, to see what was going on. But no attempt was made to call off the dogs. These, encouraged by the presence of their owners, and an unmistakable sympathy on the part of the latter which their instinct realised, rushed with renewed savagery to the attack.

There were upwards of a score of them; some really fine specimens of the greyhound breed, tawny or white, and large withal; and now it became manifest that the evil, contemptuous barbarians were actually hounding them on. Dick’s whip seemed to have lost its effect among the snapping, frantic pack, and when one brute fastened its teeth in the tendon of the hind leg of Hazel’s steed, Dick Selmes judged it time to draw his revolver.

The effect upon the dark, jeering crowd was electric. A fierce, deep, chest-note, akin to a menacing roar, took the place of the derisive laughter with which the barbarians had been enjoying the fun. Quick as animals most of them had dived into the huts. In a trice they reappeared, and there was the glint and bristle of assegais. Truly it was a formidable-looking mob, that which confronted these two, taking a peaceful afternoon ride.

The worst of it was the latter were unable to talk the Xosa tongue. Hazel, though Colonial-born, had no knowledge of it; first, because in the Cape Colony it is rather the exception than the rule to use anything but the—now world-famed—taal in intercourse with natives; secondly, because in her part of the country there were hardly any Kafirs at all, Dick Selmes because he had never even begun to learn it.

“Try them in Dutch, Hazel,” said the latter, quickly. “Tell them if they don’t call the dogs off sharp. I’ll shoot the best. Then I’ll begin to shoot them. First shot I fire, you start off home at full gallop, and never mind about me.”
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