The trio now separated, the horsemen riding more and more apart as they advanced, till they were each a couple of hundred yards from the Kaffir, who suddenly uttered a warning cry, to indicate that the great bird was beginning to run off straight away. "All right, Jack, I see," cried Dyke; and pressing his cob's sides he went off at a gallop, not, however, in pursuit of the bird, which ran right forward, with its head turned to watch its pursuers all the time. Dyke's tactics, the result of experience, were of quite another kind. He turned his cob's head, and went off like the wind at right angles to the course the ostrich was taking, and the effect was instantaneous. There was all the open veldt, or plain, spreading out for hundreds of miles before the bird, and it had only to dart off and leave the swiftest horse far behind. But its would-be cunning nature suggested to it that its enemy had laid a deep scheme to cut it off, and instead of going straight away, it turned on the instant to spin along in the same direction as that taken by the boy, and get right across him. "Ah, you silly, muddled-brained, flat-headed idiot!" yelled Dyke, as he raced along over the plain, his steed sending the red sand flying at every spurn of its hoofs as it stretched itself out. "I'll be there first, and cut him off. You can't do it--you can't do it. Ah-h-h-h!" This last shout, ending in a rattle of the tongue, seemed to stimulate the little cob to make fresh efforts; and laughing merrily to himself in the exhilaration of the race, Dyke had only to keep slightly drawing his left rein, to make the ostrich curve more and more round towards him, till he had actually deluded the bird into taking the exact direction he wished--namely, right for the pens from which it had escaped. On sped the cob, running over the sand like a greyhound, and on rushed the ostrich, its long legs going with a half-invisible twinkling effect like that produced by the spokes of a rapidly revolving wheel; its wings were half-extended, its plumage ruffled, and its long neck stretched out, with its flattened head slightly turned in the direction of the rider. And so they rode on and on, till the low range of buildings in front became nearer, the yellow sunflower disks grew bigger, and the sun glared from the white house. Still the bird saw nothing of this, but continued to run in its curve, trying to pass its pursuer, till all at once it woke to the fact that there was a long range of wire fence before it, over which were bobbing about the heads of Joe Emson's flock of its fellows, and there it was with the fence in front, and the two horsemen and Kaffir behind. Then there was a change of tactics. Dyke, who was hundreds of yards in front of his companions, knew what was coming, and gave his short-handled rhinoceros-hide whip a whish through the air, and then cracked it loudly, while a chorus of discordant cries arose from the pens.