“Boks! are they?” said I, applying my spur and making a leap over an ant-bear hole.
Rob Roy stretched his legs with a will, but a howl from Michael caused me to look round. He was trending off in another direction, and pointing violently towards something. He spoke nothing but Dutch. My acquaintance with that tongue was limited to the single word “Ja.”
He was aware of this, and his visage became all eyes and mouth in his frantic effort to assure me it would be wise were I to follow his lead.
I turned at once and galloped alongside of him in faith.
It soon became clear what he aimed at. The horsemen on the far off horizon were driving the springboks towards the stream which bounded one side of the great plain, Mike was making for the bushes that bordered that stream in the hope of reaching them before the boks should observe us.
Oh! it was a glorious burst, that first race over the wild Karroo, on a spirited steed, in the freshness of early morning—
With the silent bushboy alone by my side,
for he was silent, though tremendously excited. His brown rags fluttered in the self-made breeze, and his brown pony scrambled over the ground quite as fast as Rob Roy. We reached a clump of underwood in time, and pulled up, panting, beside a bush which was high enough to conceal the horses.
Anxiously we watched here, and carefully did I look to my rifle,—a double-barrelled breech-loading “Soaper-Henry,”—to see that it was loaded and cocked, and frequently did I take aim at stump and stone to get my hand and eye well “in,” and admiringly, with hope in every lineament, did Michael observe me.
“See anything of them, Mike?” I asked.