f in fine
style, and in the course of the afternoon heard a good deal of shouting
and banging of guns on the farther side of the river.

"Towards evening someone told me that our _impi_, as he called it
grandiloquently, was returning victorious. Having at the moment nothing
else to do, I walked down to the river at a point where the water was
deep and the banks were high. Here I climbed to the top of a pile of
boulders, whence with my field-glasses I could sweep a great extent of
plain which stretched away on the Zululand side till at length it merged
into hills and bush.

"Presently I saw some of our natives marching homewards in a scattered
and disorganised fashion, but evidently very proud of themselves, for
they were waving their assegais and singing scraps of war-songs. A few
minutes later, a mile or more away, I caught sight of a man running.

"Watching him through the glasses I noted three things: First, that
he was tall; secondly, that he ran with extraordinary swiftness; and,
thirdly, that he had something tied upon his back. It was evident,
further, that he had good reason to run, since he was being hunted by
a number of our Kaffirs, of whom more and more continually joined the
chase. From every side they poured down upon him, trying to cut him off
and kill him, for as they got nearer I could see the assegais which they
threw at him flash in the sunlight.

"Very soon I understood that the man was running with a definite object
and to a definite point; he was trying to reach the river. I thought the
sight very pitiful, this one poor creature being hunted to death by so
many. Also I wondered why he did not free himself from the bundle on
his back, and came to the conclusion that he must be a witch-doctor, and
that the bundle contained his precious charms or medicines.

"This was while he was yet a long way off, but when he came nearer,
within three or four hundred yards, of a sudden I caught the outline of
his face against a good background, and knew it for that of Magepa.

"'My God!' I said to myself, 'it is old Magepa the Buck, and the bundle
in the mat will be his grandson, Sinala!'

"Yes, even then I felt certain that he was carrying the child upon his
back.

"What was I to do? It was impossible for me to cross the river at
that place, and long before I could get round by the ford all would be
finished. I stood up on my rock and shouted to those brutes of Kaffirs
to let the man alone. They were so e