hat was often on his lips,
rode away over the veld.

The great vulture wheeled. Then he dropped like a falling stone for a
thousand yards or so, and hovered and dropped again, getting nearer--ever
so much nearer--with each descent. And where he had hovered at the first
were now a dozen specks of black upon the hot, bright blue.

A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop, and stood, sniffing the
blood-tainted air eagerly, whining a little in its throat.

The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the flock, eagerly
following his gyrations and descents, had begun to wheel and drop also.
Another wild dog appeared on the cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared
heads, with eager, sniffing noses, could be seen amongst the grass and
bush.

Then suddenly the higher vultures rose. They wheeled and soared and flew,
a bevy of winged black specks hurrying to the north. They had seen
something approaching over the veld. The great bird hanging motionless,
purposeful, lower down, became aware of his comrades' change of tactics.
With one downward stroke of his powerful wings, he shot upwards, and with
a hoarse, croaking cry took flight after the rest.

The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big light blue waggon,
drawn by a well-fed team of eight span, came lumbering over the veld.

Would the ox-team veer in another direction? Would the big blue waggon
with the new white tilt roll by?

The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and, turning on the box-seat,
spoke to a figure that sat beside him. It was a woman in loose black
garments, with a starched white coif like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered
with a floating black veil. At her side dangled and clashed a long rosary
of brown wooden beads, with a copper crucifix attached. There were two
other women in the big waggon, dressed in the same way. They were Roman
Catholic nuns--Sisters of Mercy coming up from Natal, by the order of the
Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar-Apostolic, at the request of the Bishop of
Paracos, suffragan to North-East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the
Community already established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent of the Holy
Way.

The oxen halted some fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body,
lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the
hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on
the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if
the waggon h