12 iDVENTUEES IN SOUTH AFRICA 



CHAPTER XIX. 



All my Colonial Servants desert me — Pursue them in vain — Beth Wag 

 ens get disabled — Melancholy Anticipations — Cut a Path through the 

 Forest — A sandy Desert — Cattle dying for Want of Water — Troubles 

 surmounted — Pallahs and Koodoos — A Lion and Leopard visit the 

 Camp at Midnight — Another Horse dies of Distemper — We reach 

 Booby — One of the Axle-trees breaks — The Bakatlas assist me — Thte 

 Baggage-wagon upset in a River — The Distemper kills more Horses 

 — Lions roaring — Arrival at Dr. Livingstone's — March upon Chou- 

 aney — The Ngotwani — A Herd of Buffaloes among the Keeds. 



I HAD now arrived at a period of considerable import- 

 ance in my lonely expedition, an event having occurred 

 which caused me a world of trouble and anxiety, yet 

 was nevertheless finally beneficial in its results, as it 

 taught me what difiiculties a man may surmount when 

 he is pressed by adversity, and it was also the means 

 of my becoming an accomplished wagon-driver. I al- 

 lude to my being abandoned by aU my colonial serv- 

 ants, with the exception of Ruyter, the little Bushman. 

 I attributed this unmanly and dastardly proceeding 

 mainly to their despair of succeeding in bringing the 

 wagons safely across the sandy deserts intervening be- 

 tween me and the distant missionary station of Bakat- 

 la, on account of the broken state of one of the axle- 

 trees of my traveling wagon, Kleinboy in one of his 

 Jrunken fits having driven it against a tree with such 

 violence that one of the wooden arms of the fore axle- 

 tree was cracked right across, so that little now held 

 the wheel excepting the linch-pin and the iron skein. 

 I remarked on the 22d that there was something un- 

 usual on the minds of my colonial followers, for none 



