Hans finished loading, capped and cocked the rifle, and handed it to me.  By now other vultures were appearing.  Being desperately anxious to get the thing over one way or another, at the proper moment I took the first of them.  Again I covered it dead and pressed.  Again as the gun exploded I saw that backward lurch of the bird, and heard the clap of the air upon its wings.  Then—­oh horror!—­this aasvogel turned quietly, and began to mount the ladder of the sky in the same fashion as it had descended.  I had missed once more.

“The second heap of stones has done this, baas,” said Hans faintly, and this time I did not even look him.  I only sat down and buried my face in my hands.  One more such miss, and then—­

Hans began to whisper to me.

“Baas,” he said, “those aasvogels see the flash of the gun, and shy at it like a horse.  Baas, you are shooting into their faces, for they all hang with their beaks toward you before they drop.  You must get behind them, and fire into their tails, for even an aasvogel cannot see with its tail.”

I let fall my hands and stared at him.  Surely the poor fellow had been inspired from on high!  I understood it all now.  While their beaks were towards me, I might fire at fifty vultures and never hit one, for each time they would swerve from the flash, causing the bullet to miss them, though but by a little.

“Come,” I gasped, and began to walk quickly round the edge of the depression to a rock, which I saw opposite about a hundred yards away.  My journey took me near the Zulus, who mocked me as I passed, asking where my magic was, and if I wished to see the white people killed presently.  Dingaan was now offering odds of fifty cattle to one against me, but no one would take the bet even with the king.

I made no answer; no, not even when they asked me “if I had thrown down my spear and was running away.”  Grimly, despairingly, I marched on to the rock, and took shelter behind it with Hans.  The Boers, I saw, were still upon their knees, but seemed to have ceased praying.  The children were weeping; the men stared at each other; Vrouw Prinsloo had her arm about Marie’s waist.  Waiting there behind the rock, my courage returned to me, as it sometimes does in the last extremity.  I remembered my dream and took comfort.  Surely God would not be so cruel as to suffer me to fail and thereby bring all those poor people to their deaths.

Snatching the rifle from Hans, I loaded it myself; nothing must be trusted to another.  As I put on the cap a vulture made its last circle.  It hung in the air just as the others had done, and oh! its tail was towards me.  I lifted, I aimed between the gathered-up legs, I pressed and shut my eyes, for I did not dare to look.

I heard the bullet strike, or seem to strike, and a few seconds later I heard something else—­the noise of a heavy thud upon the ground.  I looked, and there with outstretched wings lay the foul bird dead, stone dead, eight or ten paces from the bodies.