ercifully
delivered from the lion's jaws.

"At length the faint dawn came stealing like a ghost up the long slope
of bush, and glinted on the tangled oxen's horns, and with white and
frightened faces we got up and set to the task of disentangling the
oxen, till such time as there should be light enough to enable us to
follow the trail of the lioness which had gone off with Jim-Jim.
And here a fresh trouble awaited us, for when at last with infinite
difficulty we had disentangled the great helpless brutes, it was only
to find that one of the best of them was very sick. There was no mistake
about the way he stood with his legs slightly apart and his head hanging
down. He had got the redwater, I was sure of it. Of all the difficulties
connected with life and travelling in South Africa those connected with
oxen are perhaps the worst. The ox is the most exasperating animal in
the world, a negro excepted. He has absolutely no constitution, and
never neglects an opportunity of falling sick of some mysterious
disease. He will get thin upon the slightest provocation, and from mere
maliciousness die of 'poverty'; whereas it is his chief delight to turn
round and refuse to pull whenever he finds himself well in the centre of
a river, or the waggon-wheel nicely fast in a mud hole. Drive him a few
miles over rough roads and you will find that he is footsore; turn him
loose to feed and you will discover that he has run away, or if he has
not run away he has of malice aforethought eaten 'tulip' and poisoned
himself. There is always something with him. The ox is a brute. It was
of a piece with his accustomed behaviour for the one in question to
break out--on purpose probably--with redwater just when a lion had
walked off with his herd. It was exactly what I should have expected,
and I was therefore neither disappointed nor surprised.

"Well, it was no use crying as I should almost have liked to do, because
if this ox had redwater it was probable that the rest of them had it
too, although they had been sold to me as 'salted,' that is, proof
against such diseases as redwater and lungsick. One gets hardened to
this sort of thing in South Africa in course of time, for I suppose in
no other country in the world is the waste of animal life so great.

"So taking my rifle and telling Harry to follow me (for we had to leave
Pharaoh to look after the oxen--Pharaoh's lean kine, I called them),
I started to see if anything could be found of or a