"A hyena," I answered. "I could tell by the scent. But I never heard of one attacking like that."
She shuddered. Later on, after my torn arm had been bandaged, she came close to me and said in a wondrously subdued voice, "Steve, I've decided not to go to the village, if you don't want me to."
After the wounds on my arm had became scars Ellen and I resumed our rides, as might be expected. One day we had wandered rather far out on the veldt, and she challenged me to a race. Her horse easily distanced mine, and she stopped and waited for me, laughing.
She had stopped on a sort of kopje, and she pointed to a clump of trees some distance away.
"Trees!" she said gleefully. "Let's ride down there. There are so few trees on the veldt."
And she dashed away. I followed some instinctive caution, loosening my pistol in its holster, and, drawing my knife, I thrust it down in my boot so that it was entirely concealed.
We were perhaps half-way to the trees when from the tall grass about us leaped Senecoza and some twenty warriors.
One seized the girl's bridle and the others rushed me. The one who caught at Ellen went down with a bullet between his eyes, and another crumpled at my second shot. Then a thrown war-club hurled me from the saddle, half senseless, and as the blacks closed in on me I saw Ellen's horse, driven frantic by the prick of a carelessly handled spear, scream and rear, scattering the blacks who held her, and dash away at headlong speed, the bit in her teeth.
I saw Senecoza leap on my horse and give chase, flinging a savage command over his shoulder; and both vanished over the kopje.