y should not be there!

"He must; he is sure to be," I said half-aloud. "Even if he were not
there, father would know how I should be pressed for food, and be there
himself."

This was an encouraging and cheering thought; and, inspired with fresh
hope, I rode on, wondering that, though the veldt looked so unpromising,
some one had not taken up land, if only in the hope of finding minerals
where the soil forbade the fruits of fertile earth; but no. All was
barren and strange; even the granite blocks and kops were rare, and I
looked still in vain for some sign of human habitation, some track of
wheel or print of foot. The last I did begin to see now; but they were
not the prints of ironshod hoofs, only those of antelopes, large and
small, and not too frequent. Still, here was sign; and as I looked more
closely I twice saw the soft round prints of the great sand-coloured
cats, and my eyes began now to roam afield in the expectation of perhaps
seeing those which had made the marks. No; the open valley that twenty
or thirty years earlier might have been alive with game was absolutely
desolate; not one of the vast herds which used to roam there, as the old
Boers had often told me, was to be seen.

There was nothing whatever to break the long slopes of sand-coloured
soil.

Ah! what was that on the ridge to my left, which ran down till it lost
itself in the open bottom of the valley along which Sandho gently
cantered? Some white-feathered and familiar birds, displaying their
soft plumes, which looked ostrich-like in the distance. What could it
be? I knew no bird, in spite of my wanderings, that ever looked like
that. Still, a bird was a bird, and game, and the thought of game at
such a time was glorious; but my spirits sank again, for I had no
weapon, and then the grapes seemed to be sour.

"It isn't a bird; only a feather or two dropped by some old cock
ostrich," I said aloud.

No. The feathers began to rise from the edge of the ridge, and there
was a black face beneath them, then the broad breast, and finally the
full figure of a stalwart Kaffir warrior, his thin arms and ankles
ornamented with wool, his savage panoply of shield and assagai in his
left hand, and his eyes shaded by his right hand, which cut straight
across his forehead just below the fillet holding the three white
ostrich feathers. He was evidently watching me.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

PERILS WHICH GROW.

Upon making out what was before me,