This long wing of the school buildings ended here. Without, the chapel wall, buttressed and lofty, extended at right angles to it. Another convenient buttress on the other side of the window screened the corner thus formed, in most effective fashion. Haviland and his dusky satellite proceeded to pay out the cord. The end just swung clear of the ground, and the height, from twenty-five to thirty feet, was a mere nothing to such practised climbers. Down they went, hand over hand, first one, then the other. Then, taking advantage of the shadows thrown out by the rose bushes that grew outside, they flitted along the chapel wall, then over the fence and into the field beyond. How good it was to be out again, to move freely over this glorious open country spreading around so still and soft and mysterious in the moonlight! Half hundred fragrant scents seemed to blend and fuse, distilled from grass and bank and hedgerow, upon the pure night air, and mingled with the odour of kine asleep in the pasture meadows. A nightingale "jug-jugged" in an adjacent copse, and was answered by another; a large hare, long-eared and ghostly, sprang out of their way and loped off into misty dimness--but, over all, that sense of freedom, of entire and complete liberty, which a sense of risk, and very real risk, did but add to. For a keeper would likely be on his beat these moonlight nights, and to encounter one such would be almost fatal. And to-night they had higher game in view than bird-nesting. "Here it is," said Mpukuza, diving into a bed of leaves at the bottom of a dry ditch and dragging forth--an air-gun. "Now we have fun. _Au_!" Haviland's hand shook with excitement as he took the weapon. Fun indeed! Wouldn't they? He was not unpractised in the use of firearms, for on rare and happy occasions when he had visited at the country place of a distant relative he had been taught and encouraged to shoot, and he was passionately fond of the sport. But his opportunities, alas, had been few and far between. The air-gun was a good one of its kind, and up to a certain distance shot true and hard. The Zulu boy had seen it among the wares of a travelling pedlar during one of his solitary wanderings, and had purchased it for five shillings, it having probably been stolen in the first instance. He had hidden it craftily away, with an eye to just such an adventure as this. Haviland put in a pellet and fired at nothing in particular. Even the slight twang as he pulled the trigger seemed quite loud in the midnight stillness; but he felt that it would hit hard. They stole along in the shadow of a hedgerow, Haviland carrying the gun. A covert loomed darkly in front of them. As they entered it stealthily, the flap-flap of startled wood-pigeons set their nerves all tingling, for would not a tale be thereby conveyed in the event of keepers being abroad?