ry quickly the
grey light widened beyond this vast palisade of trees. Even in here
below the high branches, it began to steal vaporous and dim. About them
on every side now the buffalo were moving. The shikari's grip tightened
on Hillyard's arm. The moment of danger had come. It would be the smash
of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees
kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled
horns until long after he was dead, or--the new test and preparation to
add to those which had gone before!

Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.

"They are off"; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the
sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against
the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the
buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible. Then silence came again for a
few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the
morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets
stormed the stars.

Hillyard drew a breath.

"Let us go on," he said.

They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that
morning smote upon his eyes. A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen
donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out
among the tree-boles.

Hillyard looked at his shikari. But the shikari neither spoke nor
altered the regularity of his face. Hillyard put no question in
consequence. The Arab was ten days' journey from the nearest village
and, even so, his back was turned towards it. He was moving from
solitude into solitude still more silent and remote. It was impossible.
Hillyard's eyes were playing him false.

He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the
vision would have gone. But there was the Arab still nearer to them and
moving with a swift agility. A ray of sunlight struck through the
branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something
the man carried--a carbine with a brass hammer. And the next moment a
sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive
him. For he heard the slapping of the Arab's loose slippers upon the
hard-caked earth.

Oh yes, the man was real enough. For the shikari suddenly swerved from
the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped. The two men
talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted.
Hillyard lit his pipe.

"Who is it, Hamet?"