Our Little Boer Cousin

by Luna May Ennis

Aunt Johanna's fears, too, were grave, and Magdalena plainly informed Hercules that there could be no happy wedding on New Year's Day unless little George was captured from the Zulu, and brought home alive and well before that time.

So all night the searching party, headed by the lieutenant, Petrus and Hercules, carried great torches of flaming grass and tree-branches, and flooded with light every deep game-pit, every clump of trees, kopje, and river bank. But no answer had come. So, at sunrise, the party broke up and returned home. Grief stricken, the lieutenant with the aid of Hercules, immediately formed a large well-armed party of picked Kafirs and made straight for the Kalahari Desert. There it was he had first seen the threatening Zulu. There it was he would no doubt return with George—and perhaps take his revenge by selling George into slavery to the Bechuanas. It was a long trip back to that deadly "thirst-land." They had left by sunrise. Already the party was well on its way.

But Petrus remembered one most significant remark of his Aunt Kotie's. He remembered her telling him that Dirk had come to her from Natal, where he had been one of a gang of Zulu dock-hands, piling lumber at the wharf at Durban. She had also told him that Dirk's people belonged to the great military kraal at Ekowe, in Zululand, near the Tugela River. Petrus believed Dirk was making his escape with George, taking the shortest cut back over the robber-infested Drakensberg Mountains to the docks.

Moreover, Mutla—who, like all Kafirs, was an expert at "following the spoor"—had "spoored" the hoof-marks of the Zulu's horse from the very door of the Chief's kraal. The ground was still moist from recent rains, and Mutla's keen eyes and quickness of perception had detected the grass bent down, and pebbles scattered leaving the wet side up-turned, and often the whole hoof-press of the horse clearly stamped in the soft ground.

Mutla was certain he was following the very road the Zulu had taken. The hoof-marks led southwards, towards the Drakensberg Mountains. So for two days they traveled over the monotonous grasslands of the Orange Free State with its interminable thorn-bushes, until finally, as they neared the base of the mountains, the spoor was crossed and re-crossed by the cloven hoof indentations of the eland, the slipper-like footprints of the giraffe, and the immense circular depressions made by the elephant, with now and then, to their horror, the dreaded print of the lion's paw. Petrus and Mutla kept their rifles ready for instant use. As the trees grew thicker the whir of wings and sudden flash of brilliant plumage told them that feathered game was not wanting.

Suddenly there was a mighty rustling in the underbrush with the sound of breaking branches among the trees close to them. Mutla's pony buck-jumped, carrying his rider headlong to the ground. Five elephants burst through the trees and dashed down an embankment on the left of the road to the water, where, with mighty gurglings and splashings, the monsters threw the water from their trunks in streams over their bodies, and a little baby elephant ran about with a tree branch playfully held in his trunk.

"Oh, Baas,[16] I thought it was lions sure!" exclaimed the frightened Kafir.

"The big fellows didn't even see us, Mutla, and I don't think they would have charged us if they had. But let us water our ponies and hasten on our way."