Chapter Twenty Nine.
Hendrik Chased by the Keitloa.
Hendrik’s feelings at that moment were not to be envied. His reflections were sharply bitter. He felt mortified and humiliated. He wished he had never set eyes upon a blesbok. A sorry figure would he cut on his return to camp. He had laughed heartily at Hans and Arend. They would reciprocate that laugh, and add interest. He had ridiculed the idea of Groot Willem. Groot would not fail to pay back his scorn.
Besides, he had done his horse no good; perhaps had injured the animal. There stood he, with steaming nostrils and heaving flanks, quite used up. They were nearly twelve miles from camp. He would scarce be able to carry his rider back, and Hendrik even began to entertain doubts about his way.
The thought that he might have lost himself was just entering his mind, when his reflections were interrupted by a sound that caused him to start up from that rock, as nimbly as he had ever risen from a seat in his life.
The same sound seemed to produce a very similar effect upon his horse; for the latter, on hearing it, suddenly jerked up his drooping head, pricked his ears, snorted loudly, and, after dancing about a moment on two, shot off down the pass at full gallop!
Hendrik’s eyes did not follow him, nor his thought neither. Both were too busy with an animal that came from the opposite side, and which had uttered the sound that caused such a sudden alarm. The deep bass snort and the bellows-like blowing that followed, were no strangers to the ear of the young hunter. He knew that, on looking round, he would behold the black rhinoceros;—and he did so. That fierce creature was coming down the pass!
At first sight Hendrik was not so terribly alarmed. He had hunted the rhinoceros more than once, and did not deem it such dangerous sport. He had always been able to avoid the charges of the clumsy quadruped, and to escape out of its way when he desired.
But Hendrik for the moment had forgotten that on such occasions he was seated, not on a boulder of rock, but in the saddle, and it was to his horse that he owed his immunity from danger.
Now that his horse had run off, and he found himself afoot upon the plain, with nothing between him and the rhinoceros but twenty yards of smooth level turf, he became truly alarmed. And no wonder at it—his life was in danger.