Like a flash my idiotic blunder came home to me, and then I was ready to dash out again alone to explain; but Yamba forcibly prevented me from exposing myself to what she considered certain death.
The moment the horsemen saw us all disappear in the long grass they wheeled round, changing their course a little more to the south--they had been going west, so far as I can remember--and their caravan crawled off in a manner that suggested that the horses were pretty well done for.

On our part, we at once made for the ranges that lay a little to the south.
Here we parted with our friends the blacks, who made off in an east-south- easterly direction.
The dominant feeling within me as I saw the white men ride off was one of uncontrollable rage and mad despair.

I was apparently a pariah, with the hand of every white man--when I met one--against me.

"Well," I thought, "if civilisation is not prepared to receive me, I will wait until it is." Disappointment after disappointment, coupled with the incessant persuasions of Yamba and my people generally, were gradually reconciling me to savage life; and slowly but relentlessly the thought crept into my mind that _I was doomed never to reach civilisation again_, and so perhaps it would be better for me to resign myself to the inevitable, and stay where I was.

I would turn back, I thought, with intense bitterness and heart-break, and make a home among the tribes in the hills, where we would be safe from the white man and his murderous weapons.