They had turned off from the open plain now, and were riding through a narrow poort, or defile, which opened soon into another hill-encircled hollow. The passage was overhung with rugged cliffs, in which ere and there a stray euphorbia or a cactus had found root. Up a well-nigh perpendicular rock-face, sprawling, shambling like a tarantula on a wall, a huge male baboon was making his way. He must have been quite two hundred yards distant, and was looking over his shoulder at his natural enemies, the while straining every muscle to gain the top of the cliff.
Roden’s piece was already at his shoulder. There was a crack, then a dull thud. The baboon relaxed his hold, and with one spasmodic clutch toppled heavily to the earth.
“Good shot!” cried Suffield enthusiastically. “It’s not worth while going to pick him up. I wonder what he’s doing here all alone, though. You don’t often catch an old man baboon napping.”
“Don’t you feel as if you had committed a murder, Mr Musgrave?” said Mona.
“Not especially. On the other hand, I am gratified to find that this old Snider shoots so true. It’s a Government one I borrowed from the store for the occasion.”
“Murder be—um!—somethinged!” said Suffield. “These baboons are the most mischievous schelms out. They have discovered that young lamb is good, the brutes! Sympathy wasted, my dear child.”
But when they reached Stoffel Van Wyk’s farm they found, to Mona’s intense relief, that that typical Boer and all his house were away from home. This they elicited with difficulty between the savage bayings of four or five great ugly bullet-headed dogs, which could hardly be restrained from assailing the new arrivals by the Kaffir servant who gave the information.
“We’ll go on at once, then, Musgrave,” said Suffield. “Stoffel’s a very decent fellow, and won’t mind us shooting on his farm; though, of course, we had to call at the house as a matter of civility.”
The place for which they were bound was a long, flat-topped mountain, whose summit, belted round with a wall of cliff, was only to be gained here and there where the rock had yawned away into a deep gully. It was along the slopes at the base of the rocks that bucks were likely to be put up.
“We’ll leave the horses here with Piet,” said Suffield, “and steal up quietly and look over that ridge of rocks under the krantz. We’ll most likely get a shot.”