“Run, run!” suddenly cried Adinda’s brothers. “Saïdyah, run! there is a tiger.”
And all undid the ploughing-yokes from their buffaloes, throwing themselves on the broad backs, and galloping away through rice-fields, across dykes, through mud, through scrub and bush and prairie-grass, by fields and roads. And when they rode panting and sweating into the village of Badoor, Saïdyah was not with them.
For when he, having freed his buffalo from the yoke, had mounted, like the others, to flee as they, an unexpected bound of the animal had made him lose his balance and thrown him to the ground. The tiger was very near. . . .
Saïdyah’s buffalo, driven forward by its own speed, rushed a few leaps past the spot where his little master awaited death. But only through its own speed, and not through its own will, had it gone past Saïdyah. For scarcely had it overcome the force that controls all matter, when it turned back, planted its clumsy body on its clumsy feet above the child like a roof, and turned its horned head to the tiger. The brute sprang . . . but it sprang for the last time. The buffalo caught it on his horns and only lost some flesh that the tiger tore out at the neck. The assailant lay on the ground with ripped-up belly . . . Saïdyah was saved. It was quite true that there had been luck in the hair-twist of that buffalo!
When this buffalo had been taken from Saïdyah’s father and killed . . .
I have told you, reader, that my story is monotonous.
. . . when this buffalo was killed, Saïdyah was twelve years old, and Adinda wove shawls and painted them with a pointed headpiece. She had already thoughts to work into the course of her paint-shuttle, and she painted sadness on the texture of her fabric, for she had seen Saïdyah very sad.
And Saïdyah’s father also was deeply grieved, but his mother most of all. For it was she who had healed the wound in the neck of the faithful animal that had brought home her child unhurt,
