"Yessir!" and Abe wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "My sakes! I jes' sunk inter the rushes in a tremble, and the ole bull, with a beller that rolled down the river, turned to run. He never got mor'n ten yards when he were caught by the neck, and I yeard his bones crunch." "What caught him?" "A mouth! It were a mouth that caught him, set in a head like a water barrel, with a neck behind thick as a blue-gum tree, blue along the top and white below. Shaped like a snake it were. It caught the bull by the neck, and lay outstretched, sucking his blood, while the four legs of the poor crittur beat the air, and the cows standing off rushed about lowing. Eighty yards he was distant, and for all I were in a lather from fear, I plunked a bullet jes' back of the opened jaws. Believe me, at the sound of the gun them cows, with their tails up, charged down on that sarpint. Yessirs, they went for him like a troop of hosses. Some of them took the neck flying, without attempting any mischief, but two old cows went slap at the body with their horns down, druving them in till the blood spurted high. Then he let go o' the bull, swept the cows off their feet, and with a snort slid into the river, and came charging down like a steam tug for the mouth--his head lifted high up, and the waves streaming as he went I let drive at him as he went by, clean into the head--and at the shot he towered up like a column--and, so lifting himself, flung half his length onto the sand bar. Then he wriggled and writhed till the bulk of his middle lay high and dry, and the tail of him, twenty yards up the river, lashed the water with blows that sounded like cannon--till the swell of the waves he raised floated him off, and I saw him cut through the waves out into the deep sea beyond." "Is that all?" "Yessir, that's all; and if you'd a been there 'sted of me, Si Amos, I guess you'd a said it was too much--a darn sight too much for your nerves. As for me, I niver went near the place for a year, and when there's a spring-tide I keep indoors. One thing I seed, and that was a growth of barnacles and seaweed on his back, which explains why it is that some folk say the sea-serpent has got a mane like a hoss." CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR. THE YOUNG BURGHER. The little Dutch village was astir, where almost hidden by the trees of the orchards and quince hedges grown high, it stood beneath the bare rock-bound hills beyond Kambula. The Zulus had lifted the cattle when they grazed homewards at dusk amid the thin scattering of dark mimosas on the grey plain. The herdsman lay, with his face to the sky, unburied yet, with a terrible wound in his breast, and the long, ugly slit downwards through the abdomen that told of Zulu work. And the Commando was turning out.