I had never known wild dogs act like this, the difficulty being, as
a rule, to get within shot of them at all, and I own to a kind of eerie
feeling as I marked the persistency of these ordinarily sneaking and
cowardly brutes, sitting on their haunches there in the dusk, licking
their lips as if they knew I was for them. You see it wasn't so much on
their account I felt shivery, but it looked as if they knew what I
didn't--like the old superstition, if it be a superstition, of a shark
following a ship, pointing to an approaching death on board, or the
actual fact of a lot of aasvogels watching a wounded buck, or a wounded
anything.

"All of a sudden, I became conscious of a most sickening and
overpowering stench. By that time it was almost dark--but not too dark
to make out objects indistinctly--and the objects that caught my eye at
that moment were sufficiently hideous and appalling. All around, the
veldt was strewn with human corpses--swollen and decomposed, torn and
mangled by wild animals, or ripped and hacked by the assegais of their
slayers. They were natives, and of all ages and sexes, lying about in
contorted attitudes, some heaped upon each other, the frightfully
distorted countenances staring up at the sky. Pah! it was sickening, I
tell you, coming upon this in the dusk. There seemed no end of them,
and they were scattered as if cut down while fleeing. I learned
afterwards it was the result of a Matabili raid. Well, this find
accounted in a measure for the boldness of the wild dogs. They had been
largely feeding on the human form divine, and had acquired a
proportionate contempt for the same."

"What an experience!" said Sellon, whom this story, told amid the dark
and savage surroundings of their fireless camp, considerably impressed.
"You must have seen some uncommonly queer things in your time, Fanning?"

The other smiled slightly.

"Well, yes, I have. This is a land of strange experiences, although
prosaic enough on the surface. I hope none will befall us before we get
home again--always excepting the strange experience of finding ourselves
rich men in the shape of what we are looking for."

"By the way, whereabouts was it you were attacked that time? Anywhere
near here?"

"About half an hour's ride further on. The poort narrows very much, and
the cliffs are not nearly so high. It was just sundown, and I was
jogging quietly along homewards very much down on my luck over the third
failur