before
the equally frenzied herd behind them. They gained a momentary advantage
by riding into one of the fissures, and out again on the other side,
while their pursuers were obliged to make a detour. But in a few minutes
they were overtaken by that part of the herd who had taken the other and
nearer side of the lagoon, and were now fairly in the midst of them. The
ground shook with their trampling hoofs; their steaming breath, mingling
with the stinging dust that filled the air, half choked and blinded
Clarence. He was dimly conscious that Jim had wildly thrown his hatchet
at a cow buffalo pressing close upon his flanks. As they swept down into
another gully he saw him raise his fateful gun with utter desperation.
Clarence crouched low on his horse's outstretched neck. There was a
blinding flash, a single stunning report of both barrels; Jim reeled in
one way half out of the saddle, while the smoking gun seemed to leap in
another over his head, and then rider and horse vanished in a choking
cloud of dust and gunpowder. A moment after Clarence's horse stopped
with a sudden check, and the boy felt himself hurled over its head into
the gully, alighting on something that seemed to be a bounding cushion
of curled and twisted hair. It was the shaggy shoulder of an enormous
buffalo! For Jim's desperate random shot and double charge had taken
effect on the near hind leg of a preceding bull, tearing away the flesh
and ham-stringing the animal, who had dropped in the gully just in front
of Clarence's horse.

Dazed but unhurt, the boy rolled from the lifted fore quarters of the
struggling brute to the ground. When he staggered to his feet again, not
only his horse was gone but the whole herd of buffaloes seemed to have
passed too, and he could hear the shouts of unseen hunters now ahead of
him. They had evidently overlooked his fall, and the gully had concealed
him. The sides before him were too steep for his aching limbs to climb;
the slope by which he and the bull had descended when the collision
occurred was behind the wounded animal. Clarence was staggering towards
it when the bull, by a supreme effort, lifted itself on three legs, half
turned, and faced him.

These events had passed too quickly for the inexperienced boy to
have felt any active fear, or indeed anything but wild excitement and
confusion. But the spectacle of that shaggy and enormous front, that
seemed to fill the whole gully, rising with awful deliberation be