In those days, after a man had fired a shot, the dust rising from the galloping herds had looked like the smoke from a bush fire, and yet this day they had ridden since dawn without seeing a single wild animal.
Zouga brooded on it as he rode stirrup for stirrup with his son. Of course, this area was on the direct road to Lobengula's kraal, over which steadily more and more wagons and travellers passed. There were still vast areas beyond where the herds were thick as the grass on which they grazed. But after the road they would cut into Mashonaland, and the railway line that would follow he wondered what would remain.
Perhaps one day his grandchildren would live in a land of which every corner was as barren as this. He did not envy them the prospect; and even as he thought that, his trained hunter's eye picked up the tiny speck just above the forest line, far ahead.
For a moment he was reluctant to call Ralph's attention to it. It was the head of a giraffe, raised inquisitively high above the mimosa tree on which it was feeding.
For the first time in the hunting veld Zouga felt sick to the gut at the slaughter he knew was about to follow and he thought to distract Ralph's attention from the herd of huge spotted animals in the mimosa forest ahead.
But at that moment Ralph shouted gaily: 'There they are, I'll be damned! They are shy as blushing virgins, they are off already.'
There had been a time when Zouga had been able to ride up to within two hundred yards of a herd before they took alarm. These were still a mile away and already galloping from the two horsemen.
'Come on, Papa. We'll catch them when they try to cross the Shashi,' and they tore into the stand of flowering mimosa.
'Tally-ho!'yelled Ralph. His hat came off and, hanging on its thong, it slapped against his back; while his long dark hair fluttered in the wind of their gallop. 'By God, Papa, you'll have to work to win your sovereign today,' he warned laughingly.
They crashed out of the forest onto another level open lain. The entire herd of huge vulnerable animals were Spread before them: bulls and cows and calves, but that was not what caught Zouga's attention.
He pulled his horse down out of its gallop and swung his head away to the west.
'Ralph,' he shouted, 'let them go!'
Ralph looked back at him through the flying dust. His face was flushed with the hunter's fever.
'Warriors,' Zouga shouted. 'War party, Ralph. Close up!'
For a moment it seemed that Ralph would not obey but then his good sense prevailed. It would be reckless to separate when there was a war party out, and he broke back to Zouga's side and let the panic-driven giraffe tear away towards the river.
He reined Tom to a halt. 'What do you make of them?' he asked, shading his eyes and peering through the heatdistorted air at the squiggly black line, like a shoal of tadpoles in the bottom of a rippling'pool, which moved across the far side of the open plain. 'Kharna's men? Bamangweto raiders? We are only a few miles from the frontier.'
'We won't take any chances until we know,' Zouga told him grimly. 'Let the horses blow. We may have to make a run But Ralph interrupted him. 'Long shields! And they are red, those are the Moles, Bazo's fellows,' Ralph urged Tom towards the approaching impi. 'And I'll be damned if that isn't Bazo himself out front.'
By the time Zouga came up, Ralph had dismounted and, leaving Tom to stand, had run to embrace his old comrade, and he was already joshing Bazo cruelly.
'Hau! the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain are returning from a raid without women or cattle. Did Khama's people give you the steel farewell?'
Bazo's delighted smile slid off his face at such levity, and he shook his plumes sternly.
'Not even in jest, Henshaw, do not talk like a giggling girl. If the king had sent us to Khama,' and he stabbed the air with his assegai, 'there would have been a beautiful killing.' He broke off as he recognized Zouga.
'Baba!' he said. 'Bakela, I see you, and my eyes are white with joy.'
'It has been too long, Bazo but now you have the headring on your brow and an impi at your back, we shall shoot a beast and feast together this night.'
'Ah Bakela, it grieves me, but I am on the king's business. I return to Gubulawayo in haste to report the woman's death to the king.'
'Woman?' Zouga asked without real interest.
'A white woman. She ran from Gubulawayo without the king's word, and the king sent me after her-' Bazo broke off with an exclamation. 'Hau! But you know this woman, Bakela.'
'It is not Nomusa, my sister?' Zouga asked with quick concern. 'Not one of her daughters?'
'No, not them.'
'There are no other white women in Matabeleland.'
'She is the woman of One-Bright-Eye. The same woman who raced her horse against yours at Kimberley and won. But now she is dead.'
'Dead?' All the blood had drained from Zouga's face, leaving his tan muddy and yellow. 'Dead?' he whispered, and swayed in the saddle so that, had he not grabbed at the pommel, he would have fallen.
'Louise, dead.'
Zouga found the sycamore that Bazo described to him, merely by back-tracking the impi.
They had left a good wide spoor, and Zouga reached the tree in the middle of the afternoon.
He did not know why he tortured himself so. There could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Bazo had
