Haow!—ow—ow! The shouts of the Kafirs come nearer and nearer, and the loud-mouthed chorus of the dogs in one incessant clamour which is never suffered to die, so quickly is it taken up by fresh throats, rings from the steep hillsides as the rout sweeps down the kloof. A gentle rustling approaches, and a graceful animal bounds into the open, and its ambushed foe can mark the glint of its soft eye and the shiny points of its straight horns. It is a young bushbuck ram, and as it crosses the open Claverton waits till it has just passed him and fires. It is scarcely twenty-five yards from him, yet it is unharmed, and disappears in the opposite cover with a rush and a bound.
Claverton shakes his head and whistles softly. “What a shot!” he says. Then he looks up and catches sight of Will Jeffreys watching him with a sneering smile upon his face, and the sight angers him for a moment.
“Look out—look out, Arthur,” sounds Jim’s voice close at hand. “There’s a buck coming out, right at you.”
He starts, throws open the breech of his gun, but the cartridge jams half-way, and will neither come out nor go in again, and at that moment another antelope breaks cover and crosses the open, if anything rather nearer than the first. It is a female and hornless, and its dappled skin gleams in the sun like gold as it bounds along. Immediately afterwards Jim emerges from the bush.
“How is it you didn’t shoot?” he asks, wonderingly, reining in his horse. “Why, the buck ran right over you.”
“Look at that!” showing the state of the defaulting piece, in which the cartridge was yet jammed.
“Oh! What a nuisance! And didn’t you get the first one?”
“No. Missed him clean. You see, Jim, you build all your bucks eighteen inches or so too short hereabouts.”
Jim laughed. Jeffreys, who had also come up, did likewise, but sneeringly. “Well, you’ve had the two best shots of the day,” said the former.
“My dear fellow, I’m aware of the fact. Spare my blushes,” answered Claverton, nonchalantly.