‘Oh, he is all right,’ said Harrison; ‘he is having a grand old time amongst the guinea-fowl. He is not lost after all, he has only been following the guinea-fowl up, and, I suppose, he has succeeded in driving them into a corner at last, and is killing them one by one at his leisure; at least, that seems to be the case from the number of shots he is firing.’
All laughed, for they understood this to be a joke at Keith’s expense, for, of course all knew those shots were meant to guide them to the lost man, and were by no means fired at guinea-fowl.
Although a reply shot was fired now and again to let Keith know that help was coming, he seemed to be determined to let them know where he was, for he kept on firing, apparently as fast as he could pull out empty cartridge cases and put full ones in again.
Guided in this way, they soon came up to the place where Keith was standing. When they came up he looked thoroughly disgusted with himself and everybody else. But he felt _awfully_ glad, as he afterwards expressed it, to see them. He confessed to having really been afraid to spend the night in the bush; nameless terrors came before his mental vision, and, said he, ‘If I felt so dreadfully lonely and afraid, when I knew I could not be far away from the camp, what must one’s feeling be to be really _lost_ in the bush? It must be awful--ugh!’
‘But how did you manage to lose yourself?’ asked someone.
‘Well, you can’t understand it before you get lost yourself; I always thought I would never lose my bearings, wherever and however situated I might find myself. But when I had given up the chase of the guinea-fowl, and I wanted to retrace my steps, I could not for the life of me determine which way I had come. I was not sure which way the camp lay, and as the sun had gone down, I could not say which side was north or south. I climbed a confounded thorn tree, and after I had perforated myself with thorns, and got as high as I could, I was rewarded for my pains by seeing the tops of other thorn trees, and nothing else. I got down and ran in the direction in which I thought the camp might lie, and after running a distance I thought it must lie in another direction, so I kept running in one direction and another. I was so excited that the sweat was pouring off me in streams. At last I was so tired that I thought I had better sit down and rest, and on a little calm reflection, I saw that I was a fool for running about in this way, and that I was only tiring myself, and probably running farther and farther away from the tents, so I sat down and waited.’