the apparently interminable plains between the Vaal and the Great
Crocodile rivers, he awoke more and more to the fact that he had secured
a valuable ally. For the old warrior entered into the spirit of the
expedition at once, helping with the oxen or to extricate the waggons in
difficult places, showing himself quite at home in the management of
horses, and being evidently an excellent guide, and above all a hunter
of profound knowledge and experience.

As soon as he realised the intentions of Mr Rogers, he became most
earnest in his endeavours to get the party well on their way farther and
farther into the wilds, making the eyes of the boys dilate as he told
them in fair English of the herds of antelope and other game he would
soon show them in the plains; the giraffes, buffaloes, elephants, and,
above all, the lions, whose haunts he knew, and to which he promised to
take them.

Whenever the father began to talk in this strain his two sons grew
excited, and started to perform hunting dances, in which the number of
imaginary lions and buffaloes they slew was something enormous. Every
now and then, too, the boys killed some imaginary elephant, out of whose
unwieldy head they made believe to hack the tusks, which they invariably
brought and laid at their young masters' feet, grunting the while with
the exertion.

Dick soon grew tired of it however.

"It's all very well," he said; "but if that is the way we are to load
the waggons with ivory, we shall be a long time getting enough to pay
the expenses of the journey."

Mr Rogers joined them one day as they were walking along in advance of
the slow-moving waggon, and began to question the Zulu about the game in
the wilds north of where they were; and in his broken English he gave so
glowing an account that his hearers began to doubt its truth.

He said that when he had had to flee from his own people for his life,
he had at first gone right away into the hunting country, and stayed
there for a year, finding out, in his wanderings, places where hunting
and shooting people had never been. Here, he declared, the wild
creatures had taken refuge as in a sanctuary; and he declared that he
should take the boss who had been so kind to his boys, and both the
young bosses, to a wild place where they would find game in abundance,
and where the forests held the great rhinoceros, plenty of elephants,
and amongst whose open glades the tall giraffe browse the leafage of the
high