SYCE’S ADVENTURE 287 
one, of fully fifty great black beasts charging in column 
across the veldt which was very uneven here, some 400 yards 
away. It would have been easy, but useless and cruel to 
fire into that plunging line. You are allowed only one 
buffalo and that a bull, and to select and kill at that distance 
would have been impossible. 
Now comes in syce’s adventure. He was, as I have said, 
standing by his grazing mule some five hundred yards off, 
when this living tornado burst from the wood. He and his 
mule took in the situation with wonderful promptness. 
He was on that mule’s back with an ease and quickness 
that no one would have credited to my slow-going syce, 
and if he had been one of those who are born to “‘witch the 
world with deeds of noble horsemanship” he could not have 
ridden faster or better. The mule saw what was coming, 
and did his best and Amesi splendidly seconded his efforts. 
The mule took the road be knew, the road to camp, and 
needed little whipping, but whipped soundly he certainly 
was. 
When [I got back in the evening I found a somewhat 
anxious encampment. Syce stoutly asserted that I had been 
tracking ten lions when suddenly I was charged by a whole 
herd of buffalo. He stood his ground, he said, till all my 
men gun bearers had bolted and left me. Then he came 
to camp and if he arrived there before the others it was only 
because the mule was so frightened he could not stop it. 
Syce had scarcely disappeared and the great dark column 
of jungle beasts with him, when right behind where I stood, 
in the dense fringe of thicket, suddenly there arose a mighty 
hubbub and a crashing and trampling louder and nearer 
than anything we had yet heard. The herd had somehow 
been cut in two, one-half going off on a long circular wheel, 
to return as it proved, to their loved cover after a round 
of a couple of miles. The other half had not yet emerged, 
but getting our wind rushed, as buffalo sometimes will, in a 
