Chapter Four.The Conversion of Stephanus De La Rey.A striking contrast no less than a striking personality was offered by the two leading figures in this group as Stephanus De la Rey advanced to welcome his noted visitor. Both were fine types of their nationality and class—the one calm-faced, reposeful, with the air of a thoroughly contented and prosperous man; the other bright-eyed, restless, alert, with the nervous rapidity of movement of one existing in a state of chronic tension. The greeting between the two was cordial enough, and there was much handshaking, as the others, to the number of a round dozen, dropped in by twos and threes.“Why, who is this?” exclaimed the delegate, a shade of distrust coming into his face as he shook hands with Colvin Kershaw—for among Boers the ceremony of introduction is but seldom performed. “An Englishman, I believe?”“That is so, Mynheer Botma. And one who is very proud to make the acquaintance of so famous and gifted a man as yourself,” replied Colvin, who spoke thetaalvery fairly well.The delegate shot a keen glance at the speaker, then he became quite cordial. He hated the English, but it suddenly occurred to him that this particular Englishman had a look of one who might be turned to some account. Accordingly he engaged him in conversation, during which Colvin adroitly contrived to insinuate that his sympathies were all with the Transvaal cause, and that for the person of Oom Paul in particular he entertained feelings of the profoundest admiration.“That is good,” said Jan Grobbelaar, showing his tusks approvingly. “We were having much talk about this only last evening, brother,” Turning to the delegate: “Colvin is a neighbour of mine. He is not like other English.”Whether the object of this comment was gratified thereby or not, he made no sign; but one result of the voucher thus made was that the assembled Boers, to most of whom he was well known, conversed with far less restraint—both then and during the course of the evening. And the burden of their conversation was confined well-nigh entirely to the very strained relations then existing between the Transvaal and the suzerain Power, and what was going to be done upon the final and certain rupture thereof.Not much was said during the evening meal, and that little was mainly confined to local and farming matters and the prospects or the reverse of a speedy rain. The Boer guests fell to with a will, and did ample justice to the springbuck stew and other delicacies of the veldt as there set forth in abundance; for Mrs De la Rey had anticipated just such an inroad as had taken place. Moreover, she was a model housewife, and possessed of wonderful Dutch recipes of old-time Cape and Batavian origin, and within her domain here were none of the insipid and over-sweetened dishes which prevailed in the ordinary and rougher class of Boer household. After supper—when pipes were in full blast, in such wise, indeed, that it was hardly possible to see across the room—it was not long before the subject engrossing all minds came to the fore.“So, Colvin.Yousmoke Transvaal tobacco, then?” said one young Boer with a wink at his neighbours, and affecting surprise.“Rather, Marthinus. Why not?”“Why, because you’re an Englishman, to be sure.”“Ha-ha. But then, Marthinus, I happen to be an Englishman who smokes what he likes. And I like Transvaal tobacco. Shall I tell you what else I like? I likedop. So just send along that decanter that’s at the other side of Barend Van Zyl’s elbow, will you?”There was a great laugh at this, and Barend Van Zyl aforesaid made believe to withhold the decanter on the ground that its contents might impair the speaker’s patriotism. It led to a lot of chaff with regard to the political situation, some of which, albeit good-humoured, was keen enough to have thrown some Englishmen, Frank Wenlock, for instance, into a real fighting rage. This one, however, was made of different stuff. It didn’t ruffle him in the least. Moreover, he knew that they were merely “taking the measure of his foot.”“And they say that we can’t shoot any more, we young ones,” said another Boer. “I saw it in a Cape English newspaper which Piet Lombard had sent him. They say that we are all going off in our shooting, and are good for nothing; that we cannot bring down game like out fathers could.”“Maagtig! but they are liars, those English newspaper men,” assented somebody else. “Nee wat. I would like to get the miserable ink-squirter who wrote that, and make him run at five hundred yards from my Martini. We would soon show him whether we young ones are sosleg.”“Hallo, Marthinus, that’s a little too loud,” cut in Colvin Kershaw with a laugh. “Why, man, how about that old springbuck ram I saw you miss twice running that shoot we had at Tafelfontein at the end of last season there,oerkant, by the vlei? He wasn’t a step over four hundred yards. Come now, what would you do with your runaway man at five hundred?”“That’s true,” assented Marthinus a little crestfallen. Then brightening up: “But then the English newspaper man would be running too hard.Ja, kerelen. Now, an English newspaper manwouldrun!”“Do you know how I was taught to shoot, Colvin?” asked a wiry, middle-aged Boer with a long light beard, pushing his tobacco bag made of dressed buckskin across to the Englishman. “When I was eight years old my father used to put a loaded rifle into my hand. It was a muzzle-loader—we had no Martinis or Mausers in those days.Maagtig—no. He didn’t give me a second charge for reloading either. He would start me out into the veldt at daybreak, and if I returned without having shot a buck I got no breakfast. Then he would start me off again, and if I returned a second time without having shot a buck I was allowed some dinner, but first of all I got plenty of ‘strop.’ Then I was turned out again, and if I failed again I got still more ‘strop,’ and went to bed without any supper. But it was not more than two or three times that happened.Nee, kerelen! Well, that is the way to teach a youngster to shoot.”“That’s all very well, Izaak,” replied Colvin; “but it might be the way to teach some youngsters not to shoot. The fact of knowing they hadn’t another chance might get upon their nerves and make them miss.”But the other, whose name was Izaak van Aardt, and who was known amongst his neighbours as second to none for a sure and deadly game shot, only shook his head, unconvinced.“But,” struck in the young Dutchman who had started the chaff about the Transvaal tobacco, “it is only English youngsters who have nerves. Boer youngsters have no nerves.” And he winked at the others as at first.“Haven’t they?” responded Colvin Kershaw, with a tranquil smile. “No, especially when you tell them some yarn about thespoekthat comes out of the waggon-house at night and yells.”They laughed somewhat foolishly at this, the point being that Boer children, filled up as they are with all sorts of Hottentot stories, weird and grotesque, are no more intrepid under the circumstances named than would be other children.The above conversation, however, was significant of two things. One was the high-pitched tension to which racial feeling had attained among the northern border Dutch. It bristled with sly digs, and open ones too, at the English. They could no more keep such out of their conversation than could Mr Dick keep King Charles’s head out of his classic memorial. The second was the exceedingly friendly terms upon which this one Englishman, alone in their midst, stood towards them. Had it been otherwise, while they would have refrained from intentionally saying anything that might have been offensive to their fellow-guest, and one held in so much esteem by the people under whose roof they found themselves, they would have sat taciturn and constrained, confining the conversation for the most part to heavy monosyllables. And as emphasising these two points it is worthy of record.Now the talkers began to break up, some, however, remaining rooted to their chairs, talking out the situation with increasing vehemence. Others went out to see after their horses, while others again had convened music in the other room. The Boer, as a rule, is fond of music, even if it takes no more aspiring form than the homely strains of a concertina; and whereas both the De la Rey girls could play, and one could sing, fairly, well, their audience listened with a whole-hearted appreciation not always to be found under like circumstances in the drawing-rooms of the fashionable and of the would-be artistic. Colvin Kershaw likewise was in great request, for he had a smattering of ear knowledge which enabled him to rattle off snatches from most of the comic operas of the day, and these were hugely in favour with his somewhat primitive hearers. He could, too, on occasions, as when performing for the benefit of some old-fashioned and highly orthodox old “Tanta” who deemed all secular music an invention of Satan for the snaring of souls, turn such and similar lively strains, by an alteration of time and expression, into the most solemn and soul-stirring of psalm tunes; to the convulsive, because concealed, delight of Andrina and Condaas and others in the know, and to the ecstatic edification of the antiques aforesaid, who would go away thinking that if only “Mynheer” would induce the performer to play on the harmonium in church on Sunday, what a long way they would travel in order to be present.But the lighter side of life is never far removed from the momentous, and this was represented in another part of the house, whose owner was closeted in long and earnest conversation with “the Patriot.”“You are the man we want, Brother De la Rey,” the latter was saying in his quick, emphatic voice, having spent an hour setting forth his mission in all its fulness, and that with the convincing earnestness of a man who thoroughly believes in it. “Just consider. The whole of this district is with us, and not merely the whole of this district but the whole of the Northern border. Others, too, as far as the seaboard on one side and the Cape on the other. You cannot stand aloof. You cannot be the only one to refuse to side with your countrymen, those of your own blood, in their struggle for freedom and power.”“We had better not talk too much about freedom,” was the reply, with a grave head-shake, “I should like to know, Brother Botma, under what Government we could enjoy greater freedom than that under which we are now living.”“‘Under which?’ Yes, that is just it. ‘Under which.’ But we ought not to be living ‘under’ any Government but our own. Our independence—that is the star to which our eyes turn. That you yourself dwell happy and in comfort here, Stephanus De la Rey, is but an unworthy way of looking at it. Are the ties of blood-brotherhood nothing? Are the ties of nationality nothing? Is our independence nothing? Selfish considerations must be thrown away now. Why, even you have two sons with us. They will fight in our ranks. Will you, then, fight in those of the enemy?”“I do not desire any fighting. I deplore this trouble. If the Kafirs were to rise, for instance, I do not think you would find me backward. Ask those who know me if I am not speaking true. But this is a struggle between white men, and in a land, too, where they ought to be brothers.”“Brothers? We and the English can never be brothers. Listen, Stephanus,” laying an impressive hand upon the other’s arm. “It is a struggle for life and death between us and them. To this end they have been working. To this end have they been throwing all their adventurers into our land. Yes; how many from this country, this very British colony you are so proud to belong to, have come to us without a penny—unable even so much as to make a living under the British flag—have come to us on the very verge of bankruptcy, and actually through it—to make not merely a living, but in many cases large fortunes? And these are the people with a grievance! These are the people who fatten on our land, and then want to seize it because it is richer than theirs. That is why they desire the franchise, that they may oust the burghers who fought for their independence; whose fathers shed their blood like water in withstanding the heathen savage, who went forth determined never again to submit to the English yoke.”“That is true,” rejoined the other. “Yet it seems to me that it is because of them that the country has become rich. Had they not come there, what then? Who would have worked the gold and the mines?”“We could have done without the gold and the mines,” was the fiery response. “We did not desire them. We were better as we were. And look, brother. Did these Uitlanders come into our land to benefit our land? If so, why do they not stay there when they have enriched themselves out of it? Do they? Not so. They return to spend the wealth they have made out of us among the Babylon sinks of vice, the large cities of Europe. They came into the land to enrich themselves, certainly not to enrich our land. But now that it is rich they want to seize it.”The listener made no immediate reply. He sat in troubled meditation, his brow clouded. The speaker, watched him the while with a kind of hungering anxiety. This was the man he desired to win over, a man of weight and standing, whose influence thrown into the scale would bring hundreds to the Afrikander cause and confirm hundreds more who might be wavering. He went on:“Everything is ready now. The President will never yield to their demands, and even if he would the burghers will never allow it. If we gave them the five years’ franchise they would then ask for two, then for none at all. And where would we be? Where would we be, I ask you, remembering the shameful attempt upon us three years ago? Mark now, brother. We are about to put forth our strength. We know our strength, they do not. They know not that we are ten times stronger than they think. They boast that by the end of the year the English flag will wave over Pretoria. Will it? We shall see.“They think that they have only to threaten us and we shall collapse. They have forgotten the lessons of 1881. A God-protected people fighting for its liberties is a terrible thing, Stephanus, and that is what we were then and what we are now. We have for years been collecting arms and ammunition which will render us strong enough for the whole British Army. And then when the whole British Army is hurled against us there are European nations who will hurl themselves upon England. They will not lose their opportunity. They hate England too much for that. Then is our time. Now, Stephanus, will you be the only man who refuses to join his own nationality? I go from here to-morrow, for my mission is at an end, and it has been fruitful beyond my hopes. When I return it will be with our conquering forces to help plant the ‘Vierkleur’ over our new Republic, which shall extend from the Zambesi to the Cape. My dear brother, think. We want you; we want such men as you among our leaders. Throw selfish considerations away, and link yourself with the holy army of patriots.”The speaker ceased. Carried away by his own fervour, he could hardly any longer bring out his words with sufficient coherence. And that very fervour had carried his listener with him. Stephanus De la Rey was, to tell the truth, deeply impressed. True, he himself had no reason to be otherwise than perfectly contented; but had he any right to consider his own prosperity, his own well-being, when the cause of his countrymen was at stake? Transvaal, Free State, or Cape Colony, were they not all of one blood—all Dutch? Many a man would have considered what advantages might accrue to himself by joining the movement, what risk, even danger, was incurred by abstaining; but this one was honest to the core. The patriotic side was what appealed to him, that and that only. And looking at him as though reading his thoughts, Andries Botma, the Transvaal delegate, was filled with a whole-souled elation. He knew he had won, and that however much time and thought he might give to the situation between this and then, the moment the forces of the allied Republics crossed the border Stephanus De la Rey would be upon their side.But this Stephanus De la Rey did not know himself, not, at any rate, at that time.
A striking contrast no less than a striking personality was offered by the two leading figures in this group as Stephanus De la Rey advanced to welcome his noted visitor. Both were fine types of their nationality and class—the one calm-faced, reposeful, with the air of a thoroughly contented and prosperous man; the other bright-eyed, restless, alert, with the nervous rapidity of movement of one existing in a state of chronic tension. The greeting between the two was cordial enough, and there was much handshaking, as the others, to the number of a round dozen, dropped in by twos and threes.
“Why, who is this?” exclaimed the delegate, a shade of distrust coming into his face as he shook hands with Colvin Kershaw—for among Boers the ceremony of introduction is but seldom performed. “An Englishman, I believe?”
“That is so, Mynheer Botma. And one who is very proud to make the acquaintance of so famous and gifted a man as yourself,” replied Colvin, who spoke thetaalvery fairly well.
The delegate shot a keen glance at the speaker, then he became quite cordial. He hated the English, but it suddenly occurred to him that this particular Englishman had a look of one who might be turned to some account. Accordingly he engaged him in conversation, during which Colvin adroitly contrived to insinuate that his sympathies were all with the Transvaal cause, and that for the person of Oom Paul in particular he entertained feelings of the profoundest admiration.
“That is good,” said Jan Grobbelaar, showing his tusks approvingly. “We were having much talk about this only last evening, brother,” Turning to the delegate: “Colvin is a neighbour of mine. He is not like other English.”
Whether the object of this comment was gratified thereby or not, he made no sign; but one result of the voucher thus made was that the assembled Boers, to most of whom he was well known, conversed with far less restraint—both then and during the course of the evening. And the burden of their conversation was confined well-nigh entirely to the very strained relations then existing between the Transvaal and the suzerain Power, and what was going to be done upon the final and certain rupture thereof.
Not much was said during the evening meal, and that little was mainly confined to local and farming matters and the prospects or the reverse of a speedy rain. The Boer guests fell to with a will, and did ample justice to the springbuck stew and other delicacies of the veldt as there set forth in abundance; for Mrs De la Rey had anticipated just such an inroad as had taken place. Moreover, she was a model housewife, and possessed of wonderful Dutch recipes of old-time Cape and Batavian origin, and within her domain here were none of the insipid and over-sweetened dishes which prevailed in the ordinary and rougher class of Boer household. After supper—when pipes were in full blast, in such wise, indeed, that it was hardly possible to see across the room—it was not long before the subject engrossing all minds came to the fore.
“So, Colvin.Yousmoke Transvaal tobacco, then?” said one young Boer with a wink at his neighbours, and affecting surprise.
“Rather, Marthinus. Why not?”
“Why, because you’re an Englishman, to be sure.”
“Ha-ha. But then, Marthinus, I happen to be an Englishman who smokes what he likes. And I like Transvaal tobacco. Shall I tell you what else I like? I likedop. So just send along that decanter that’s at the other side of Barend Van Zyl’s elbow, will you?”
There was a great laugh at this, and Barend Van Zyl aforesaid made believe to withhold the decanter on the ground that its contents might impair the speaker’s patriotism. It led to a lot of chaff with regard to the political situation, some of which, albeit good-humoured, was keen enough to have thrown some Englishmen, Frank Wenlock, for instance, into a real fighting rage. This one, however, was made of different stuff. It didn’t ruffle him in the least. Moreover, he knew that they were merely “taking the measure of his foot.”
“And they say that we can’t shoot any more, we young ones,” said another Boer. “I saw it in a Cape English newspaper which Piet Lombard had sent him. They say that we are all going off in our shooting, and are good for nothing; that we cannot bring down game like out fathers could.”
“Maagtig! but they are liars, those English newspaper men,” assented somebody else. “Nee wat. I would like to get the miserable ink-squirter who wrote that, and make him run at five hundred yards from my Martini. We would soon show him whether we young ones are sosleg.”
“Hallo, Marthinus, that’s a little too loud,” cut in Colvin Kershaw with a laugh. “Why, man, how about that old springbuck ram I saw you miss twice running that shoot we had at Tafelfontein at the end of last season there,oerkant, by the vlei? He wasn’t a step over four hundred yards. Come now, what would you do with your runaway man at five hundred?”
“That’s true,” assented Marthinus a little crestfallen. Then brightening up: “But then the English newspaper man would be running too hard.Ja, kerelen. Now, an English newspaper manwouldrun!”
“Do you know how I was taught to shoot, Colvin?” asked a wiry, middle-aged Boer with a long light beard, pushing his tobacco bag made of dressed buckskin across to the Englishman. “When I was eight years old my father used to put a loaded rifle into my hand. It was a muzzle-loader—we had no Martinis or Mausers in those days.Maagtig—no. He didn’t give me a second charge for reloading either. He would start me out into the veldt at daybreak, and if I returned without having shot a buck I got no breakfast. Then he would start me off again, and if I returned a second time without having shot a buck I was allowed some dinner, but first of all I got plenty of ‘strop.’ Then I was turned out again, and if I failed again I got still more ‘strop,’ and went to bed without any supper. But it was not more than two or three times that happened.Nee, kerelen! Well, that is the way to teach a youngster to shoot.”
“That’s all very well, Izaak,” replied Colvin; “but it might be the way to teach some youngsters not to shoot. The fact of knowing they hadn’t another chance might get upon their nerves and make them miss.”
But the other, whose name was Izaak van Aardt, and who was known amongst his neighbours as second to none for a sure and deadly game shot, only shook his head, unconvinced.
“But,” struck in the young Dutchman who had started the chaff about the Transvaal tobacco, “it is only English youngsters who have nerves. Boer youngsters have no nerves.” And he winked at the others as at first.
“Haven’t they?” responded Colvin Kershaw, with a tranquil smile. “No, especially when you tell them some yarn about thespoekthat comes out of the waggon-house at night and yells.”
They laughed somewhat foolishly at this, the point being that Boer children, filled up as they are with all sorts of Hottentot stories, weird and grotesque, are no more intrepid under the circumstances named than would be other children.
The above conversation, however, was significant of two things. One was the high-pitched tension to which racial feeling had attained among the northern border Dutch. It bristled with sly digs, and open ones too, at the English. They could no more keep such out of their conversation than could Mr Dick keep King Charles’s head out of his classic memorial. The second was the exceedingly friendly terms upon which this one Englishman, alone in their midst, stood towards them. Had it been otherwise, while they would have refrained from intentionally saying anything that might have been offensive to their fellow-guest, and one held in so much esteem by the people under whose roof they found themselves, they would have sat taciturn and constrained, confining the conversation for the most part to heavy monosyllables. And as emphasising these two points it is worthy of record.
Now the talkers began to break up, some, however, remaining rooted to their chairs, talking out the situation with increasing vehemence. Others went out to see after their horses, while others again had convened music in the other room. The Boer, as a rule, is fond of music, even if it takes no more aspiring form than the homely strains of a concertina; and whereas both the De la Rey girls could play, and one could sing, fairly, well, their audience listened with a whole-hearted appreciation not always to be found under like circumstances in the drawing-rooms of the fashionable and of the would-be artistic. Colvin Kershaw likewise was in great request, for he had a smattering of ear knowledge which enabled him to rattle off snatches from most of the comic operas of the day, and these were hugely in favour with his somewhat primitive hearers. He could, too, on occasions, as when performing for the benefit of some old-fashioned and highly orthodox old “Tanta” who deemed all secular music an invention of Satan for the snaring of souls, turn such and similar lively strains, by an alteration of time and expression, into the most solemn and soul-stirring of psalm tunes; to the convulsive, because concealed, delight of Andrina and Condaas and others in the know, and to the ecstatic edification of the antiques aforesaid, who would go away thinking that if only “Mynheer” would induce the performer to play on the harmonium in church on Sunday, what a long way they would travel in order to be present.
But the lighter side of life is never far removed from the momentous, and this was represented in another part of the house, whose owner was closeted in long and earnest conversation with “the Patriot.”
“You are the man we want, Brother De la Rey,” the latter was saying in his quick, emphatic voice, having spent an hour setting forth his mission in all its fulness, and that with the convincing earnestness of a man who thoroughly believes in it. “Just consider. The whole of this district is with us, and not merely the whole of this district but the whole of the Northern border. Others, too, as far as the seaboard on one side and the Cape on the other. You cannot stand aloof. You cannot be the only one to refuse to side with your countrymen, those of your own blood, in their struggle for freedom and power.”
“We had better not talk too much about freedom,” was the reply, with a grave head-shake, “I should like to know, Brother Botma, under what Government we could enjoy greater freedom than that under which we are now living.”
“‘Under which?’ Yes, that is just it. ‘Under which.’ But we ought not to be living ‘under’ any Government but our own. Our independence—that is the star to which our eyes turn. That you yourself dwell happy and in comfort here, Stephanus De la Rey, is but an unworthy way of looking at it. Are the ties of blood-brotherhood nothing? Are the ties of nationality nothing? Is our independence nothing? Selfish considerations must be thrown away now. Why, even you have two sons with us. They will fight in our ranks. Will you, then, fight in those of the enemy?”
“I do not desire any fighting. I deplore this trouble. If the Kafirs were to rise, for instance, I do not think you would find me backward. Ask those who know me if I am not speaking true. But this is a struggle between white men, and in a land, too, where they ought to be brothers.”
“Brothers? We and the English can never be brothers. Listen, Stephanus,” laying an impressive hand upon the other’s arm. “It is a struggle for life and death between us and them. To this end they have been working. To this end have they been throwing all their adventurers into our land. Yes; how many from this country, this very British colony you are so proud to belong to, have come to us without a penny—unable even so much as to make a living under the British flag—have come to us on the very verge of bankruptcy, and actually through it—to make not merely a living, but in many cases large fortunes? And these are the people with a grievance! These are the people who fatten on our land, and then want to seize it because it is richer than theirs. That is why they desire the franchise, that they may oust the burghers who fought for their independence; whose fathers shed their blood like water in withstanding the heathen savage, who went forth determined never again to submit to the English yoke.”
“That is true,” rejoined the other. “Yet it seems to me that it is because of them that the country has become rich. Had they not come there, what then? Who would have worked the gold and the mines?”
“We could have done without the gold and the mines,” was the fiery response. “We did not desire them. We were better as we were. And look, brother. Did these Uitlanders come into our land to benefit our land? If so, why do they not stay there when they have enriched themselves out of it? Do they? Not so. They return to spend the wealth they have made out of us among the Babylon sinks of vice, the large cities of Europe. They came into the land to enrich themselves, certainly not to enrich our land. But now that it is rich they want to seize it.”
The listener made no immediate reply. He sat in troubled meditation, his brow clouded. The speaker, watched him the while with a kind of hungering anxiety. This was the man he desired to win over, a man of weight and standing, whose influence thrown into the scale would bring hundreds to the Afrikander cause and confirm hundreds more who might be wavering. He went on:
“Everything is ready now. The President will never yield to their demands, and even if he would the burghers will never allow it. If we gave them the five years’ franchise they would then ask for two, then for none at all. And where would we be? Where would we be, I ask you, remembering the shameful attempt upon us three years ago? Mark now, brother. We are about to put forth our strength. We know our strength, they do not. They know not that we are ten times stronger than they think. They boast that by the end of the year the English flag will wave over Pretoria. Will it? We shall see.
“They think that they have only to threaten us and we shall collapse. They have forgotten the lessons of 1881. A God-protected people fighting for its liberties is a terrible thing, Stephanus, and that is what we were then and what we are now. We have for years been collecting arms and ammunition which will render us strong enough for the whole British Army. And then when the whole British Army is hurled against us there are European nations who will hurl themselves upon England. They will not lose their opportunity. They hate England too much for that. Then is our time. Now, Stephanus, will you be the only man who refuses to join his own nationality? I go from here to-morrow, for my mission is at an end, and it has been fruitful beyond my hopes. When I return it will be with our conquering forces to help plant the ‘Vierkleur’ over our new Republic, which shall extend from the Zambesi to the Cape. My dear brother, think. We want you; we want such men as you among our leaders. Throw selfish considerations away, and link yourself with the holy army of patriots.”
The speaker ceased. Carried away by his own fervour, he could hardly any longer bring out his words with sufficient coherence. And that very fervour had carried his listener with him. Stephanus De la Rey was, to tell the truth, deeply impressed. True, he himself had no reason to be otherwise than perfectly contented; but had he any right to consider his own prosperity, his own well-being, when the cause of his countrymen was at stake? Transvaal, Free State, or Cape Colony, were they not all of one blood—all Dutch? Many a man would have considered what advantages might accrue to himself by joining the movement, what risk, even danger, was incurred by abstaining; but this one was honest to the core. The patriotic side was what appealed to him, that and that only. And looking at him as though reading his thoughts, Andries Botma, the Transvaal delegate, was filled with a whole-souled elation. He knew he had won, and that however much time and thought he might give to the situation between this and then, the moment the forces of the allied Republics crossed the border Stephanus De la Rey would be upon their side.
But this Stephanus De la Rey did not know himself, not, at any rate, at that time.
Chapter Five.Signs.“Jij verdomde Engelschman! Stil maar! Ik saal nit nou jou kop afslaan!” (Note 1.)The speaker is a big Dutchman, the scene the stoep of a roadside hotel in the Karroo, the spoken-to Frank Wenlock. We regret, however, to be obliged to record that our friend has taken on board a glass or two more than he can stow with absolute regard either to equilibrium or strict decorum. A Cape cart and a buggy, the harness hung loosely to the splashboard, stand out-spanned by the broad dusty road, and three or four horses with their saddles on are grouped beneath a stumpy, spreading mimosa, as rooted to the spot by the mere fact of two or three inches of their bridles trailing on the ground as though tied fast to anything solid and tangible.For reply to the threat, Frank Wenlock utters a defiant laugh, then once more lifts up his voice in song:“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!Oom Paul op een vark gerij,Af hij val en zier gekrij,Toen klim op en veg gerij.”With a growl and a curse the big Boer comes at him. He is nearly a head the taller and far the heavier and more powerful man; but Frank Wenlock knows how to use his hands a bit, and, “sprung” as he is, he parries the sledge-hammer blow aimed at him by his large assailant, and stands ready. The latter begins to parley:“What do you insult our President for, then?” he growls.“Can’t I sing a song if I want?” returns Frank. “Besides, Oom Paul isn’t your President.”“Ah, but he soon will be. And won’t he make therooineksrun?”“Well, here’s arooinekyou can’t make run, Hermanus Delport, elephant as you are. Come along and have a try, will you? What? You won’t? You’re a bally coward then—and you’re twice my size.“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,Oom Paul op een vark gerij—”he begins again in a tone that is insulting and defiant to the last degree.There are other Dutchmen on the stoep. These, who have laughed hitherto, expecting to see their huge compatriot simply double up the smaller but foolhardy Englishman, now spring to their feet with incensed shouts.“Go at him, Hermanus. Knock him down and lay yoursjambokabout him. Cut him intoriempjes. We’ll give him Oom Paul!” are some of the cries wherewith they nerve their champion on to war.There is no backing out of it now. Delport hurls himself upon Frank, who stands there, squaring up, and still singing the nonsensical—and to Boer susceptibilities offensive—quatrain. But a very hard right- and lefthander meets him, and that in each eye, causing him to stagger back. Frank, however, has not come off unscathed, for the big Boer’s fist has more than grazed his cheekbone. The others crowd up behind their champion, renewing their shouts of encouragement.“Come on, come on! I’ll take the bally lot of you, when I’ve polished off that elephant there,” shouts Frank in English, waltzing towards the group, his hands up and ready.“No, you jolly well won’t, Frank,” cuts in another English voice, whose owner tranquilly steps in between the combatants. “Come now, stop making a fool of yourself, of all yourselves.”“I shan’t. Get out of this, Colvin, and—mind your own business,” retorted Frank, speaking none too articulately. “Old elephant Hermanus said he could make rooineks run. I want him to make thisrooinekrun—if he can.”“He insulted the President,” shouted the Boers. “Ja, he sang an insulting song.”“Now, Frank, you know you did, for I heard you while I was getting ready to inspan,” said Colvin Kershaw in his most persuasive tones. “And look here, old chap, fair-play you know is fair-play. If one of them had sung such stuff as that about the Queen—rotten, contemptible stuff as it is—how long would it be before you sailed into him?”“Not one bally second,” replied Frank briskly.“Well, then—you’ve trodden on these chaps’ corns pretty hard, and you might as well tell them you were only larking.”The speaker was on tenterhooks, for he knew by experience what a difficult customer Frank Wenlock was to manage on the few occasions when he had had a drop too much. The chances that he would become obstreperous and provoke a general row or not were about even. But either the moral influence of his mentor was paramount, or some glimmer of the logical faculty had worked its way into Frank’s thoughtless but good-natured mind, and he was amenable.“Toen, kerelen, I didn’t mean anything,” he called out in Dutch; “I was only larking. Let’s have another drink all-round.”“No, you don’t, Frank,” said Colvin quickly and in an undertone. “You’ve quite enough of that cargo on board already.”By this time the horses were inspanned, and the two went among the group of Boers to bid farewell. Some put out a paw with more than half a scowl on their faces, others turned into the house to avoid the necessity of shaking hands with Englishmen at all. Among these was Hermanus Delport.“Ja, wait a bit!” he growled, half aloud. “Wait a bit, friend Wenlock! If I don’t put a bullet through you before this year is dead, I’ll—I’ll become an Englishman.”And he rubbed some raw spirit on his now fast-swelling bruises, a dark and vengeful scowl upon his heavy face. The seed scattered by Andries Botma had been well sown.Chucking a sixpence to the ragged, yellow-skinned Hottentot, who sprang away from the horses’ heads, Colvin whipped up, sending the buggy spinning over the flat Karroo road, the dust flying up obliquely from the hoofs and wheels in a long, fan-like cloud. They were returning from Schalkburg, the district town, and had a good two hours of smart driving to reach Spring Holt, the Wenlocks’ farm, before dark—for they had made a late start from the township. For the first hour Frank was a bit drowsy, then, when he had pulled himself together a bit, his guide, philosopher, and friend judged it time to deliver something of a lecture.“Frank, you know this won’t do. I thought you had more self-control. The last two times we have been into Schalkburg together you’ve come out boozy.”“Oh, hang it, old chap, it was so beastly hot! If we had started before breakfast instead of at twelve, it would have been all right. But Schalkburg is such a dry hole, and you get such a thirst on!”“I don’t. But you will get liquoring up with every man Jack who speaks to you.”“Well, but—you can’t refuse. And then you only go in there once in a blue moon. Surely one can have a bit of a spree.”“No, you needn’t—not that sort of spree. And you can refuse. I often do. No—no—old chap, you can’t afford to make a Hottentot of yourself, and remember, you’ve got womenkind to look after.”“Er—I say, Colvin, you know. Don’t let go anything to them about this, will you?”“Of course not. Don’t you know me better than that? But squarely, Frank, unless you undertake to get on another tack I’ll never go into Schalkburg with you again.”“Anyone would think I was a regular boozer,” said Frank, sulkily.“That’s just what I don’t want you to become. And look here, you jolly near got up the devil’s own row at Reichardt’s. Those Dutchmen will spread all over the country that we were both roaring tight. Besides, what if that row had come off—we should come home nice objects with our noses broken and our teeth kicked down our throats? For remember they were a round dozen, and we only two, and some of these very ones, I happen to know, are pretty tough customers. Here, Frank. Take the reins, so long. There are a couple of finepauw. Think we can get any nearer?”“No. Let go at them from the cart.”They had just topped a light swell, and there, about two hundred and odd yards from the road, stalked the great bustards. Quickly Colvin slipped from the buggy, and keeping on its other side, rifle in hand, watched his chance. Taking a careful and steady aim, he fired. Both birds rose, and winged their flight, but, after a few yards, the hindermost half dropped, then, flopping along a little further, came heavily to the earth, where it lay with wings outspread and quite dead.“That’s good!” observed Colvin; “I knew he’d got it, heard the bullet ‘klop’.”They picked up the splendid bird and regained the road. But before they had gone half a mile they made out a horseman riding furiously after them as though in pursuit.“It’s old Sarel Van der Vyver,” said Frank, looking back. “Let’s give him a gallop, eh? He looks in a devil of a rage.”“No—no! We must smooth him down,” answered Colvin, drawing the pace in to a slow trot. Very soon their pursuer galloped up, and they made out an old Boer in a weather-beaten white chimney-pot hat, and wearing a bushy grey beard. He seemed, as Frank had said, “in a devil of a rage,” and brandished in his hand a long-barrelled Martini.“Daag, Oom Sarel!” called out the two in the buggy.But the old man met this amenity with a torrent of abuse. What did they mean by coming into his veldt and shooting his game without his leave, and scaring his ostriches all over the place? He did not keep game to be shot byverdomde rooineks, not he. And much more to the same effect.Both were rather surprised. They had never been on other than the friendliest of terms with this old man, and now he was rating them as though he had never seen them before in their lives. Well, here was another very significant sign of the times. But it gave Colvin an idea.“Take the bird, Oom Sarel,” he said, making as though he would pull it out from the back of the buggy. “I only shot it for the fun of the thing—and besides, it was possible that Andries Botma might be at Spring Holt when we got back, and a finepauwmight come in handy for the supper of the Patriot.”The effect of the name was magical.“Kyk! Do you know Mynheer Botma, then?” asked the old Boer, in round-eyed astonishment.“We had a great talk together at Stephanus De la Rey’s the other night, Oom Sarel,” responded Colvin; “but come along with us, and see if he has arrived at Wenlock’s to-night.”This invitation the old man declined, though somewhat reluctantly. “He could not leave home,” he said. “But the bird—of course they must keep it. A friend of the Patriot! Well, well, Colvin must not mind what had been said at first. He,” the speaker, “had been a little put out that day, and was growing old.” Then exchanging fills out of each other’s pouch, they literally smoked the pipe of peace together, and parted amid much cordial handshaking.“There’s a sign of the times for you, Frank,” said Colvin as they resumed their way. “Andries Botma’s name is one to conjure with these days. But note how his influence crops up all along the line! Even old Sarel Van der Vyver was prepared to make himself disagreeable. Not a Dutchman round here will hesitate to join the Transvaal, if things go at all wrong with us.”“I’d cut short his influence with a bullet or a rope if I were Milner,” growled Frank.Soon, in the distance, the homestead came in sight Colvin dropped into silence, letting his thoughts wander forth to the welcome that awaited him, and the central figure of that welcome spelt May Wenlock. He was not in love with her, yet she appealed to more than one side of his nature. She was very pretty, and very companionable; and girls of whom that could be said were very few and far between in the Wildschutsberg surroundings. Several of the Boer girls were the first, but few of them had any ideas, being mostly of the fluffy-brained, giggling type. May was attractive to him, undeniably so, but if he tried to analyse it he decided that it was because they had been thrown so much together; and if he had evoked any partiality in her, he supposed it was for the same reason—there was no one else.“Who’s that likely to be, Frank?” he said, as they drew near enough to make out a male figure on the stoep.“Eh? Who? Where?” returned Frank, starting up, for he was drowsy. “Maagtig, it looks like Upton, the scab-inspector.Ja. It is.”No—there was nothing lacking in the welcome that shone in May’s eyes, thought Colvin, as they exchanged a hand-pressure. And he was conscious of a very decided feeling of gratification; indeed he would not have been human were it otherwise.“Well, Upton, what’s the news?” said Frank, as they were outspanning, and unpacking the contents of the buggy. “Is it going to be war?”“Don’t know. Looks like it. The troops in Grahamstown and King are getting ready for all they know how. Man, but things are looking nasty. The Dutchmen up in the Rooi-Ruggensberg are as bumptious as they can be. Two of them wouldn’t let me look at their flocks at all. I shall have to summon them, I suppose.”The duties of the speaker being to overhaul periodically the flocks of all the farmers, Dutch and British, within a large area, in search of the contagious and pestilential scab, it followed that he was in the way of gauging the state of feeling then prevalent. Personally, he was a very popular man, wherefore the fact of his having met with active opposition was the more significant as to the state of the country.“They’re just the same here,” said Frank. “For my part, the sooner we have a war the better. I wish our farm was somewhere else, though. We are too much in among the Dutch here for things to be pleasant for the mother and May when the fun does begin.”Now Master Frank, though carefully omitting to specify what had led up to the incident of the road wherewith this chapter opens, expatiated a great deal upon the incident itself in the course of the evening, thereby drawing from his mother much reproof, uttered, however, in a tone that was more than half an admiring one. But in that of May was no note of admiration. It was all reproving.“You are much too quarrelsome, Frank,” she said; “I don’t see anything particularly plucky in always wanting to fight people. It’s a good thing you had someone to look after you.” And the swift glance which accompanied this should have been eminently gratifying to the “someone” who had looked after him.“Oh, if you’re all down upon a chap, I shall scoot. I’m going round to give the horses a feed. Coming, Upton?”“Ja,” replied that worthy; and they went out. So did Mrs Wenlock, having something or other to see to in the kitchen.There was silence between the two thus left. Colvin, sitting back in a cane chair, was contemplating the picture before him in the most complacent state of satisfaction. How pretty the girl looked bending over the ornamental work she was engaged in, the lamplight upon her wavy golden hair, the glow of freshness and health in her cheeks, the thick lashes half veiling the velvety-blue eyes!“Well?” she said softly, looking up. “Talk to me.”“Haven’t got anything to say. I’m tired. I prefer to look at you instead.”“You are a dear to say so,” she answered. “But all the same I want livening up. I am getting a dreadful fossil—we all are—stuck away here, and never seeing a soul. I believe I shall get mother to let me go away for quite a long time. I am horribly tired of it all.”“And of me?”“You know I am not.”The blue eyes were very soft as they met his. A wave of feeling swept over the man. Looking at her in her winning, inviting beauty as she sat there, an overwhelming impulse came upon him to claim her—to take her for his own. Why should he not? He knew that it lay entirely with him. He made a movement to rise. In another moment she would be in his arms, and he would be pouring words of passion and tenderness into her ear. The door opened.“Haven’t those two come in yet?” said Mrs Wenlock briskly, as she re-entered, and quietly resumed her seat, thus unconsciously affecting a momentous crisis in two lives. Was it for good or for ill? We shall see.Note 1. “You d—d Englishman! Be quiet. I’ll knock your head off just now.”Note 2.“Oom Paul is riding on a pig—He falls off and hurts himself,Then climbs up and rides away—”A nonsensical bit of popular doggerel. In Dutch it makes a jingling rhyme.
“Jij verdomde Engelschman! Stil maar! Ik saal nit nou jou kop afslaan!” (Note 1.)
The speaker is a big Dutchman, the scene the stoep of a roadside hotel in the Karroo, the spoken-to Frank Wenlock. We regret, however, to be obliged to record that our friend has taken on board a glass or two more than he can stow with absolute regard either to equilibrium or strict decorum. A Cape cart and a buggy, the harness hung loosely to the splashboard, stand out-spanned by the broad dusty road, and three or four horses with their saddles on are grouped beneath a stumpy, spreading mimosa, as rooted to the spot by the mere fact of two or three inches of their bridles trailing on the ground as though tied fast to anything solid and tangible.
For reply to the threat, Frank Wenlock utters a defiant laugh, then once more lifts up his voice in song:
“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!Oom Paul op een vark gerij,Af hij val en zier gekrij,Toen klim op en veg gerij.”
“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!Oom Paul op een vark gerij,Af hij val en zier gekrij,Toen klim op en veg gerij.”
With a growl and a curse the big Boer comes at him. He is nearly a head the taller and far the heavier and more powerful man; but Frank Wenlock knows how to use his hands a bit, and, “sprung” as he is, he parries the sledge-hammer blow aimed at him by his large assailant, and stands ready. The latter begins to parley:
“What do you insult our President for, then?” he growls.
“Can’t I sing a song if I want?” returns Frank. “Besides, Oom Paul isn’t your President.”
“Ah, but he soon will be. And won’t he make therooineksrun?”
“Well, here’s arooinekyou can’t make run, Hermanus Delport, elephant as you are. Come along and have a try, will you? What? You won’t? You’re a bally coward then—and you’re twice my size.
“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,Oom Paul op een vark gerij—”
“Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,Oom Paul op een vark gerij—”
he begins again in a tone that is insulting and defiant to the last degree.
There are other Dutchmen on the stoep. These, who have laughed hitherto, expecting to see their huge compatriot simply double up the smaller but foolhardy Englishman, now spring to their feet with incensed shouts.
“Go at him, Hermanus. Knock him down and lay yoursjambokabout him. Cut him intoriempjes. We’ll give him Oom Paul!” are some of the cries wherewith they nerve their champion on to war.
There is no backing out of it now. Delport hurls himself upon Frank, who stands there, squaring up, and still singing the nonsensical—and to Boer susceptibilities offensive—quatrain. But a very hard right- and lefthander meets him, and that in each eye, causing him to stagger back. Frank, however, has not come off unscathed, for the big Boer’s fist has more than grazed his cheekbone. The others crowd up behind their champion, renewing their shouts of encouragement.
“Come on, come on! I’ll take the bally lot of you, when I’ve polished off that elephant there,” shouts Frank in English, waltzing towards the group, his hands up and ready.
“No, you jolly well won’t, Frank,” cuts in another English voice, whose owner tranquilly steps in between the combatants. “Come now, stop making a fool of yourself, of all yourselves.”
“I shan’t. Get out of this, Colvin, and—mind your own business,” retorted Frank, speaking none too articulately. “Old elephant Hermanus said he could make rooineks run. I want him to make thisrooinekrun—if he can.”
“He insulted the President,” shouted the Boers. “Ja, he sang an insulting song.”
“Now, Frank, you know you did, for I heard you while I was getting ready to inspan,” said Colvin Kershaw in his most persuasive tones. “And look here, old chap, fair-play you know is fair-play. If one of them had sung such stuff as that about the Queen—rotten, contemptible stuff as it is—how long would it be before you sailed into him?”
“Not one bally second,” replied Frank briskly.
“Well, then—you’ve trodden on these chaps’ corns pretty hard, and you might as well tell them you were only larking.”
The speaker was on tenterhooks, for he knew by experience what a difficult customer Frank Wenlock was to manage on the few occasions when he had had a drop too much. The chances that he would become obstreperous and provoke a general row or not were about even. But either the moral influence of his mentor was paramount, or some glimmer of the logical faculty had worked its way into Frank’s thoughtless but good-natured mind, and he was amenable.
“Toen, kerelen, I didn’t mean anything,” he called out in Dutch; “I was only larking. Let’s have another drink all-round.”
“No, you don’t, Frank,” said Colvin quickly and in an undertone. “You’ve quite enough of that cargo on board already.”
By this time the horses were inspanned, and the two went among the group of Boers to bid farewell. Some put out a paw with more than half a scowl on their faces, others turned into the house to avoid the necessity of shaking hands with Englishmen at all. Among these was Hermanus Delport.
“Ja, wait a bit!” he growled, half aloud. “Wait a bit, friend Wenlock! If I don’t put a bullet through you before this year is dead, I’ll—I’ll become an Englishman.”
And he rubbed some raw spirit on his now fast-swelling bruises, a dark and vengeful scowl upon his heavy face. The seed scattered by Andries Botma had been well sown.
Chucking a sixpence to the ragged, yellow-skinned Hottentot, who sprang away from the horses’ heads, Colvin whipped up, sending the buggy spinning over the flat Karroo road, the dust flying up obliquely from the hoofs and wheels in a long, fan-like cloud. They were returning from Schalkburg, the district town, and had a good two hours of smart driving to reach Spring Holt, the Wenlocks’ farm, before dark—for they had made a late start from the township. For the first hour Frank was a bit drowsy, then, when he had pulled himself together a bit, his guide, philosopher, and friend judged it time to deliver something of a lecture.
“Frank, you know this won’t do. I thought you had more self-control. The last two times we have been into Schalkburg together you’ve come out boozy.”
“Oh, hang it, old chap, it was so beastly hot! If we had started before breakfast instead of at twelve, it would have been all right. But Schalkburg is such a dry hole, and you get such a thirst on!”
“I don’t. But you will get liquoring up with every man Jack who speaks to you.”
“Well, but—you can’t refuse. And then you only go in there once in a blue moon. Surely one can have a bit of a spree.”
“No, you needn’t—not that sort of spree. And you can refuse. I often do. No—no—old chap, you can’t afford to make a Hottentot of yourself, and remember, you’ve got womenkind to look after.”
“Er—I say, Colvin, you know. Don’t let go anything to them about this, will you?”
“Of course not. Don’t you know me better than that? But squarely, Frank, unless you undertake to get on another tack I’ll never go into Schalkburg with you again.”
“Anyone would think I was a regular boozer,” said Frank, sulkily.
“That’s just what I don’t want you to become. And look here, you jolly near got up the devil’s own row at Reichardt’s. Those Dutchmen will spread all over the country that we were both roaring tight. Besides, what if that row had come off—we should come home nice objects with our noses broken and our teeth kicked down our throats? For remember they were a round dozen, and we only two, and some of these very ones, I happen to know, are pretty tough customers. Here, Frank. Take the reins, so long. There are a couple of finepauw. Think we can get any nearer?”
“No. Let go at them from the cart.”
They had just topped a light swell, and there, about two hundred and odd yards from the road, stalked the great bustards. Quickly Colvin slipped from the buggy, and keeping on its other side, rifle in hand, watched his chance. Taking a careful and steady aim, he fired. Both birds rose, and winged their flight, but, after a few yards, the hindermost half dropped, then, flopping along a little further, came heavily to the earth, where it lay with wings outspread and quite dead.
“That’s good!” observed Colvin; “I knew he’d got it, heard the bullet ‘klop’.”
They picked up the splendid bird and regained the road. But before they had gone half a mile they made out a horseman riding furiously after them as though in pursuit.
“It’s old Sarel Van der Vyver,” said Frank, looking back. “Let’s give him a gallop, eh? He looks in a devil of a rage.”
“No—no! We must smooth him down,” answered Colvin, drawing the pace in to a slow trot. Very soon their pursuer galloped up, and they made out an old Boer in a weather-beaten white chimney-pot hat, and wearing a bushy grey beard. He seemed, as Frank had said, “in a devil of a rage,” and brandished in his hand a long-barrelled Martini.
“Daag, Oom Sarel!” called out the two in the buggy.
But the old man met this amenity with a torrent of abuse. What did they mean by coming into his veldt and shooting his game without his leave, and scaring his ostriches all over the place? He did not keep game to be shot byverdomde rooineks, not he. And much more to the same effect.
Both were rather surprised. They had never been on other than the friendliest of terms with this old man, and now he was rating them as though he had never seen them before in their lives. Well, here was another very significant sign of the times. But it gave Colvin an idea.
“Take the bird, Oom Sarel,” he said, making as though he would pull it out from the back of the buggy. “I only shot it for the fun of the thing—and besides, it was possible that Andries Botma might be at Spring Holt when we got back, and a finepauwmight come in handy for the supper of the Patriot.”
The effect of the name was magical.
“Kyk! Do you know Mynheer Botma, then?” asked the old Boer, in round-eyed astonishment.
“We had a great talk together at Stephanus De la Rey’s the other night, Oom Sarel,” responded Colvin; “but come along with us, and see if he has arrived at Wenlock’s to-night.”
This invitation the old man declined, though somewhat reluctantly. “He could not leave home,” he said. “But the bird—of course they must keep it. A friend of the Patriot! Well, well, Colvin must not mind what had been said at first. He,” the speaker, “had been a little put out that day, and was growing old.” Then exchanging fills out of each other’s pouch, they literally smoked the pipe of peace together, and parted amid much cordial handshaking.
“There’s a sign of the times for you, Frank,” said Colvin as they resumed their way. “Andries Botma’s name is one to conjure with these days. But note how his influence crops up all along the line! Even old Sarel Van der Vyver was prepared to make himself disagreeable. Not a Dutchman round here will hesitate to join the Transvaal, if things go at all wrong with us.”
“I’d cut short his influence with a bullet or a rope if I were Milner,” growled Frank.
Soon, in the distance, the homestead came in sight Colvin dropped into silence, letting his thoughts wander forth to the welcome that awaited him, and the central figure of that welcome spelt May Wenlock. He was not in love with her, yet she appealed to more than one side of his nature. She was very pretty, and very companionable; and girls of whom that could be said were very few and far between in the Wildschutsberg surroundings. Several of the Boer girls were the first, but few of them had any ideas, being mostly of the fluffy-brained, giggling type. May was attractive to him, undeniably so, but if he tried to analyse it he decided that it was because they had been thrown so much together; and if he had evoked any partiality in her, he supposed it was for the same reason—there was no one else.
“Who’s that likely to be, Frank?” he said, as they drew near enough to make out a male figure on the stoep.
“Eh? Who? Where?” returned Frank, starting up, for he was drowsy. “Maagtig, it looks like Upton, the scab-inspector.Ja. It is.”
No—there was nothing lacking in the welcome that shone in May’s eyes, thought Colvin, as they exchanged a hand-pressure. And he was conscious of a very decided feeling of gratification; indeed he would not have been human were it otherwise.
“Well, Upton, what’s the news?” said Frank, as they were outspanning, and unpacking the contents of the buggy. “Is it going to be war?”
“Don’t know. Looks like it. The troops in Grahamstown and King are getting ready for all they know how. Man, but things are looking nasty. The Dutchmen up in the Rooi-Ruggensberg are as bumptious as they can be. Two of them wouldn’t let me look at their flocks at all. I shall have to summon them, I suppose.”
The duties of the speaker being to overhaul periodically the flocks of all the farmers, Dutch and British, within a large area, in search of the contagious and pestilential scab, it followed that he was in the way of gauging the state of feeling then prevalent. Personally, he was a very popular man, wherefore the fact of his having met with active opposition was the more significant as to the state of the country.
“They’re just the same here,” said Frank. “For my part, the sooner we have a war the better. I wish our farm was somewhere else, though. We are too much in among the Dutch here for things to be pleasant for the mother and May when the fun does begin.”
Now Master Frank, though carefully omitting to specify what had led up to the incident of the road wherewith this chapter opens, expatiated a great deal upon the incident itself in the course of the evening, thereby drawing from his mother much reproof, uttered, however, in a tone that was more than half an admiring one. But in that of May was no note of admiration. It was all reproving.
“You are much too quarrelsome, Frank,” she said; “I don’t see anything particularly plucky in always wanting to fight people. It’s a good thing you had someone to look after you.” And the swift glance which accompanied this should have been eminently gratifying to the “someone” who had looked after him.
“Oh, if you’re all down upon a chap, I shall scoot. I’m going round to give the horses a feed. Coming, Upton?”
“Ja,” replied that worthy; and they went out. So did Mrs Wenlock, having something or other to see to in the kitchen.
There was silence between the two thus left. Colvin, sitting back in a cane chair, was contemplating the picture before him in the most complacent state of satisfaction. How pretty the girl looked bending over the ornamental work she was engaged in, the lamplight upon her wavy golden hair, the glow of freshness and health in her cheeks, the thick lashes half veiling the velvety-blue eyes!
“Well?” she said softly, looking up. “Talk to me.”
“Haven’t got anything to say. I’m tired. I prefer to look at you instead.”
“You are a dear to say so,” she answered. “But all the same I want livening up. I am getting a dreadful fossil—we all are—stuck away here, and never seeing a soul. I believe I shall get mother to let me go away for quite a long time. I am horribly tired of it all.”
“And of me?”
“You know I am not.”
The blue eyes were very soft as they met his. A wave of feeling swept over the man. Looking at her in her winning, inviting beauty as she sat there, an overwhelming impulse came upon him to claim her—to take her for his own. Why should he not? He knew that it lay entirely with him. He made a movement to rise. In another moment she would be in his arms, and he would be pouring words of passion and tenderness into her ear. The door opened.
“Haven’t those two come in yet?” said Mrs Wenlock briskly, as she re-entered, and quietly resumed her seat, thus unconsciously affecting a momentous crisis in two lives. Was it for good or for ill? We shall see.
Note 1. “You d—d Englishman! Be quiet. I’ll knock your head off just now.”
Note 2.
“Oom Paul is riding on a pig—He falls off and hurts himself,Then climbs up and rides away—”
“Oom Paul is riding on a pig—He falls off and hurts himself,Then climbs up and rides away—”
A nonsensical bit of popular doggerel. In Dutch it makes a jingling rhyme.
Chapter Six.Colvin makes a Discovery.“Gert.”“Baas?”“Saddle up Aasvogel after breakfast. I am going over to Krantz Kop.”Thus Colvin Kershaw to his henchman, Gert Bondelzwart. The latter was a bastard Griqua—an elderly man, of good height and powerful build. He had taken part in the Langeberg rising, but had been “slim” enough to slip away just in time, and had contrived to put a large section of country between himself and the scene of his former misdeeds. At this man Colvin’s neighbours looked askew. He had “schelm” writ large all over his yellow personality, they declared. Colvin himself thought them likely to be right; but then Gert suited him. He was a good servant, and had never given him any trouble. Moreover, he had an idea that the fellow had, for some unaccountable reason, conceived an attachment for himself. Anyway, he did not choose to part with him to please anybody.“Did you hear what I said, Gert?”“Ja, sir.”“Then why the devil don’t you answer, and go and do what I tell you, instead of standing there shaking your silly head as if a bee had stung you in the ear?”“Krantz Kop is up at the far end of theberg, sir. Boermenschenup there verykwaai.”“Well? What’s that to you? I didn’t say I wanted an after-rider.”“Gideon Roux veryschelmBoer, sir. Strange things happen at Krantz Kop.”“Oh, go away, Gert. Get in Aasvogel from the camp—no, he’s still in the stable. Well, give him another bundle, so long.”“What am I to ride, sir?”“You to ride? Confound you, I said I didn’t want an after-rider.”“I would like to go with Baas.”Something about the persistency of the man struck Colvin. This yellow-skinned henchman of his was a wonderful fellow, and there was precious little he didn’t know. Well, he would take him.“You can go then, Gert. You’ll have to ride Pansy, and she’s in a camp full ofkwaaibirds. Cobus and the others can help get her out—but hurry up, for I don’t want to be kept waiting.”Colvin turned into his house and sat down to his solitary breakfast, waited upon by Gert’s wife, a middle-aged well-looking woman, as neat in her attire and person as the table arrangements were scrupulously clean and well served; a very jewel of a housekeeper, he was wont to declare, for a miserable bachelor establishment in the Karroo. The house itself was of no great pretensions—being merely a type of a not very well-to-do farmer’s residence—it having just passed out of the possession of that class of Boer. But there was plenty of room in it, and it could easily be improved, if its present owner made up his mind to remain on in it. And, indeed, it was a matter not very far from foreign to the question of improving and remaining on in it that was occupying the said owner’s mind as he sat alone at breakfast that morning.How would May Wenlock look in her bright, sweet freshness, making a second at that solitary table? Her personality seemed to be creeping more and more into his life. Why did he not ask her to share it, the more so that he had no doubt as to what the answer would be? He was not a conceited man, but he was a fairly experienced and clear-sighted one, and would have been a born fool had he failed to perceive that the girl was more than partial to him.Propinquity—that is, opportunity—has much to answer for. They had been thrown together a great deal, for have we not said that he had spent some time with the Wenlocks while looking about for a farm of his own? Moreover, he had come there handicapped by a kind of spurious heroic glamour, in that he was supposed to have saved Frank’s life on one occasion in the Matopo Hills, what time they were hotly pressed by the Matabele, and that rash youth had chosen to hang back when he should have been retiring with the column. He had collected half a dozen volunteers and brought him out just in time. To his own mind it had been all in the day’s work, but others had seen fit to make a great deal more of it than it seemed to deserve. Of course the girl had begun by making a sort of hero of him. Again, he himself personally was the kind of man that women take to—cultured, travelled, well-bred, and full ofsavoir vivre. It would have been strange if, considering the life the girl led, the few men she saw, of her own nationality at least—for although several of the young Dutch men around were both well-looking and well educated, she could not take to them—she should come to think a great deal of her brother’s friend, and their only English neighbour. Hence the intimacy that had grown and ripened between them.Now he sat there thinking everything out. How near he had been only the evening before last to asking her to share his life! A fraction of a moment more would have done it, but for the interruption—timely or otherwise. Which was it? He loved her—how indeed could he help doing so, when in addition to all her attractions she was always so sweet and lovable to him? But he was notin lovewith her. He had passed the age for “falling in love;” had reached that wherein men become wholesomely critical. May WenlockasMay Wenlock was one personality—and a very charming and alluring personality at that May Wenlock with a proprietary interest, and a legally signed and sealed vested right in himself, was another. He had not been slow to descry in her a very strong spice of natural temper and wilfulness; and although now her demeanour towards himself was invariably sweet and winning, would it always be so? And this was a side of the picture which did not allure.Propinquity! He had seen repeated instances, of the results of this, had even experienced some. The girl or, woman who “could not live without you” to-day might be voting you a bore of the first water by this time next year, or even earlier. Personally he had never felt disposed to find fault with this development. It cut both ways, as often as not in point of fact, his experience told him. But on one occasion, long years ago, it had not. He had been hard hit, and the process had left a bruise, a scar, not readily obliterated. Now, however, applying the recollection of that case to this, he decided that the symptoms were wanting. He was not in love with May, much as her presence appealed to him, and yet the consciousness of what he knew his presence meant to her afforded him a gratification he would not have been human had he not experienced.Preferentially, too, he was not inclined to embark in matrimony. He had seen too much of it—too many instances of the weary humdrum chain thus riveted, the welding together of two lives into a deteriorating round of petty frictions which it furnished. But in this instance there was a still greater and, to his mind, more fatal bar. With all the advantages, the free and easy social code, and republican waiving of social distinctions which colonial life afforded, the fact remained that the Wenlocks were some little way from being his social equals. And he was a great believer in birth and breeding. In which connection he could not but admit to himself that the mere fact of the interruption by Mrs Wenlock of theirtête-à-têtethe other evening had jarred less upon him than a something in her tone and speech when effecting it. More uneasily still, he was constrained to admit that he had on certain rare occasions detected manifestations of lack of breeding in May herself, such indeed as he had never traced a sign of, at any time or under any circumstances, in the De la Rey girls for instance, or in any member of that family. And yet Stephanus de la Rey was “only a Boer.”At this juncture the sound of horse hoofs outside cut short his meditations. The morning air was fresh and keen, and Aasvogel, a tall, deep-shouldered iron-grey, having been stabled for some days, gave him plenty to take care of when first mounted. But Colvin was fond of riding, so presently, letting out the powerful animal for all he wanted over the wide Karroo plains, a sense of keen joyous exhilaration scattered all serious thought to the four winds of heaven.Soon the plain was left behind, giving way to a steep, rugged mountain-road winding between the spurs. Higher and higher it led, overhung by craggy cliffs, resonant with the shrill scream of thedasjeand the loud hoarse bark of the sentinel baboon.“Look there, Baas,” said Gert Bondelzwart, pointing to a cleft which ran up into a krantz where the slope ended not very high overhead. “That is where Gideon Roux shot a Kafir. He is aschelmBoer is Gideon Roux.”“Was it during the war?”“Nee, nee, sir. The Kafir had come to take away a girl Gideon Roux had on his place. Gideon did not want her to go, but the Kafir insisted—said he had been sent by her people to fetch her. So Gideon had him tied to the waggon-wheel and thrashed him with anagter os sjambok, till he should promise not to ask for the girl any more. He would not; so Gideon left him tied up all night, promising him some more sjambok in the morning. But by then the Kafir had managed to get loose. He hadn’t much start, though, and they hunted him with dogs. He tried to hide in that hole there, but Gideon and Hermanus Delport they called to him to come out. He wouldn’t. He had climbed on a rock inside to escape the dogs and was afraid to move. So they shot him dead.”“When was this, Gert, and what did they do with the body?”“About three years ago, Baas, or it might have been four. Do with the body?Maagtig, sir! There are holes and pits in these mountains where you or I might conveniently disappear and never be heard of again.”“Are you cooking up a yam, Gert, just to pass the time; for don’t you know that in this country you can’t shoot even a Kafir and stow him comfortably away without being tried for murder and hanged?”The man shook his head, with a very humorous look upon his yellow face. It bordered almost upon amused contempt.“It can be done, sir, and it was done. All the country knows it. Gideon Roux and Hermanus Delport only laugh. Not a man in the Wildschutsberg or the Rooi-Ruggensberg would dare accuse them, or dare come forward to give evidence.Nee, sir, not a man, white, brown, or black. There are veryschelmBoers in these mountains, and whoever tried to stir up that affair his life would not be worth a tickey. They would shoot him as they did the Kafir.”Colvin reined in his horse to the slowest of foot-paces, and stared at the cleft as though struck with an idea.“Have you ever been into that hole, Gert?”“Nee, sir.”“Then how do you know there is a rock in there the Kafir could jump on to escape Gideon Roux’s dogs?”“That is the story, Baas.”“Well, I’m going to have a look inside there. You remain here with the horses, and if anyone passes you can say I have gone after a reebok under the krantz.”The ascent, though steep, was not long, and soon Colvin was standing within the mouth of the hole. It was a jagged fissure—running about twenty feet into the cliff, then narrowing to a low tunnel of about ten more.Yes, this was quite correct. There was a rock—or rather a boulder. Colvin pictured, by the light of a flaming vesta, the hunted man standing gingerly on the apex of this to avoid the excited springs and snaps of the dogs. There was no sign, however, of any human remains—but—wait. Hallo! what was this?The tunnel, which narrowed in from the end of the fissure, was half blocked. Colvin lighted another vesta, and bent down. Through the piled-up dust he made out what looked like a square rectangular stone. Stone? No—it was wood. It was one of three long flat packing-cases, piled one on top of the other. His nerves tingled with excitement. What discovery was he on the point of making? At any rate, whatever it might be, he would make it.Now that his vision was accustomed to the semi-gloom he had no need of artificial light. The glimmering that entered from the outer day was sufficient. He hauled out the uppermost case. But how to open it? That might be done. Fortunately, he was provided with a large pocket-knife, containing various appliances which included a strong screwdriver. What was he going to discover? Human remains? Perhaps. Why, there might be others stowed away in like manner; victims of the wild and lawless inhabitants of this remote mountain district.Then it occurred to him that the chest was very heavy. What on earth could it contain, and, by the way, what right had he to pry into its contents? For a moment he paused. But the curiosity and excitement attending upon this discovery were too great. Possibly, even, these chests and their contents had lain there for years and years unknown to anybody—even to the owner of the wild, and stony, and scattered stock-run on which they were hidden, but remembering Gert’s story that did not seem likely. Anyway, he would share the mystery with whoever held it. That could do no harm to anybody.The lid was strongly screwed down. A few minutes of vigorous perspiring work and it was up. Whatever the contents were, they were protected by a thick wrapper of oilskin. This he proceeded to unwind, but carefully, so as to be able to replace it readily. Then a quantity of tow, also well oiled, and then—No human remains, no shining coins, no old and massive silver, no treasure of any kind met his eager gaze. But there, in the top of the box, lay several rifles in a row.He took one out, carried it as near the light of day as he dared go, and examined it. The weapon was one of the newest pattern—a Mauser. The others on the top layers were all alike. Allowing for the depth of the chest, he reckoned that it must contain at least a couple of dozen rifles. Here was a discovery. What was the meaning of this secret armoury? There could be only one. For only one purpose could these weapons be stowed away thus in the caves of the rocks—for the arming of the rebel Boers when the word went forth for them to rise, and join their brethren in the Transvaal and Free State, to throw off the British yoke from the Zambesi to Cape Agulhas.Replacing the rifle, he rapidly screwed down the case, and stowed it away in the hole whence he had taken it, carefully piling up the dust and loose earth against it and the others so as to obviate all trace of interference. Hardly had he done so than the sound of hoof-strokes and harsh voices without struck upon his ear. Peering cautiously forth, he beheld, down upon the track from which he had ascended, two armed and mounted Boers, and they were in close confabulation with Gert Bondelzwart, his retainer.
“Gert.”
“Baas?”
“Saddle up Aasvogel after breakfast. I am going over to Krantz Kop.”
Thus Colvin Kershaw to his henchman, Gert Bondelzwart. The latter was a bastard Griqua—an elderly man, of good height and powerful build. He had taken part in the Langeberg rising, but had been “slim” enough to slip away just in time, and had contrived to put a large section of country between himself and the scene of his former misdeeds. At this man Colvin’s neighbours looked askew. He had “schelm” writ large all over his yellow personality, they declared. Colvin himself thought them likely to be right; but then Gert suited him. He was a good servant, and had never given him any trouble. Moreover, he had an idea that the fellow had, for some unaccountable reason, conceived an attachment for himself. Anyway, he did not choose to part with him to please anybody.
“Did you hear what I said, Gert?”
“Ja, sir.”
“Then why the devil don’t you answer, and go and do what I tell you, instead of standing there shaking your silly head as if a bee had stung you in the ear?”
“Krantz Kop is up at the far end of theberg, sir. Boermenschenup there verykwaai.”
“Well? What’s that to you? I didn’t say I wanted an after-rider.”
“Gideon Roux veryschelmBoer, sir. Strange things happen at Krantz Kop.”
“Oh, go away, Gert. Get in Aasvogel from the camp—no, he’s still in the stable. Well, give him another bundle, so long.”
“What am I to ride, sir?”
“You to ride? Confound you, I said I didn’t want an after-rider.”
“I would like to go with Baas.”
Something about the persistency of the man struck Colvin. This yellow-skinned henchman of his was a wonderful fellow, and there was precious little he didn’t know. Well, he would take him.
“You can go then, Gert. You’ll have to ride Pansy, and she’s in a camp full ofkwaaibirds. Cobus and the others can help get her out—but hurry up, for I don’t want to be kept waiting.”
Colvin turned into his house and sat down to his solitary breakfast, waited upon by Gert’s wife, a middle-aged well-looking woman, as neat in her attire and person as the table arrangements were scrupulously clean and well served; a very jewel of a housekeeper, he was wont to declare, for a miserable bachelor establishment in the Karroo. The house itself was of no great pretensions—being merely a type of a not very well-to-do farmer’s residence—it having just passed out of the possession of that class of Boer. But there was plenty of room in it, and it could easily be improved, if its present owner made up his mind to remain on in it. And, indeed, it was a matter not very far from foreign to the question of improving and remaining on in it that was occupying the said owner’s mind as he sat alone at breakfast that morning.
How would May Wenlock look in her bright, sweet freshness, making a second at that solitary table? Her personality seemed to be creeping more and more into his life. Why did he not ask her to share it, the more so that he had no doubt as to what the answer would be? He was not a conceited man, but he was a fairly experienced and clear-sighted one, and would have been a born fool had he failed to perceive that the girl was more than partial to him.
Propinquity—that is, opportunity—has much to answer for. They had been thrown together a great deal, for have we not said that he had spent some time with the Wenlocks while looking about for a farm of his own? Moreover, he had come there handicapped by a kind of spurious heroic glamour, in that he was supposed to have saved Frank’s life on one occasion in the Matopo Hills, what time they were hotly pressed by the Matabele, and that rash youth had chosen to hang back when he should have been retiring with the column. He had collected half a dozen volunteers and brought him out just in time. To his own mind it had been all in the day’s work, but others had seen fit to make a great deal more of it than it seemed to deserve. Of course the girl had begun by making a sort of hero of him. Again, he himself personally was the kind of man that women take to—cultured, travelled, well-bred, and full ofsavoir vivre. It would have been strange if, considering the life the girl led, the few men she saw, of her own nationality at least—for although several of the young Dutch men around were both well-looking and well educated, she could not take to them—she should come to think a great deal of her brother’s friend, and their only English neighbour. Hence the intimacy that had grown and ripened between them.
Now he sat there thinking everything out. How near he had been only the evening before last to asking her to share his life! A fraction of a moment more would have done it, but for the interruption—timely or otherwise. Which was it? He loved her—how indeed could he help doing so, when in addition to all her attractions she was always so sweet and lovable to him? But he was notin lovewith her. He had passed the age for “falling in love;” had reached that wherein men become wholesomely critical. May WenlockasMay Wenlock was one personality—and a very charming and alluring personality at that May Wenlock with a proprietary interest, and a legally signed and sealed vested right in himself, was another. He had not been slow to descry in her a very strong spice of natural temper and wilfulness; and although now her demeanour towards himself was invariably sweet and winning, would it always be so? And this was a side of the picture which did not allure.
Propinquity! He had seen repeated instances, of the results of this, had even experienced some. The girl or, woman who “could not live without you” to-day might be voting you a bore of the first water by this time next year, or even earlier. Personally he had never felt disposed to find fault with this development. It cut both ways, as often as not in point of fact, his experience told him. But on one occasion, long years ago, it had not. He had been hard hit, and the process had left a bruise, a scar, not readily obliterated. Now, however, applying the recollection of that case to this, he decided that the symptoms were wanting. He was not in love with May, much as her presence appealed to him, and yet the consciousness of what he knew his presence meant to her afforded him a gratification he would not have been human had he not experienced.
Preferentially, too, he was not inclined to embark in matrimony. He had seen too much of it—too many instances of the weary humdrum chain thus riveted, the welding together of two lives into a deteriorating round of petty frictions which it furnished. But in this instance there was a still greater and, to his mind, more fatal bar. With all the advantages, the free and easy social code, and republican waiving of social distinctions which colonial life afforded, the fact remained that the Wenlocks were some little way from being his social equals. And he was a great believer in birth and breeding. In which connection he could not but admit to himself that the mere fact of the interruption by Mrs Wenlock of theirtête-à-têtethe other evening had jarred less upon him than a something in her tone and speech when effecting it. More uneasily still, he was constrained to admit that he had on certain rare occasions detected manifestations of lack of breeding in May herself, such indeed as he had never traced a sign of, at any time or under any circumstances, in the De la Rey girls for instance, or in any member of that family. And yet Stephanus de la Rey was “only a Boer.”
At this juncture the sound of horse hoofs outside cut short his meditations. The morning air was fresh and keen, and Aasvogel, a tall, deep-shouldered iron-grey, having been stabled for some days, gave him plenty to take care of when first mounted. But Colvin was fond of riding, so presently, letting out the powerful animal for all he wanted over the wide Karroo plains, a sense of keen joyous exhilaration scattered all serious thought to the four winds of heaven.
Soon the plain was left behind, giving way to a steep, rugged mountain-road winding between the spurs. Higher and higher it led, overhung by craggy cliffs, resonant with the shrill scream of thedasjeand the loud hoarse bark of the sentinel baboon.
“Look there, Baas,” said Gert Bondelzwart, pointing to a cleft which ran up into a krantz where the slope ended not very high overhead. “That is where Gideon Roux shot a Kafir. He is aschelmBoer is Gideon Roux.”
“Was it during the war?”
“Nee, nee, sir. The Kafir had come to take away a girl Gideon Roux had on his place. Gideon did not want her to go, but the Kafir insisted—said he had been sent by her people to fetch her. So Gideon had him tied to the waggon-wheel and thrashed him with anagter os sjambok, till he should promise not to ask for the girl any more. He would not; so Gideon left him tied up all night, promising him some more sjambok in the morning. But by then the Kafir had managed to get loose. He hadn’t much start, though, and they hunted him with dogs. He tried to hide in that hole there, but Gideon and Hermanus Delport they called to him to come out. He wouldn’t. He had climbed on a rock inside to escape the dogs and was afraid to move. So they shot him dead.”
“When was this, Gert, and what did they do with the body?”
“About three years ago, Baas, or it might have been four. Do with the body?Maagtig, sir! There are holes and pits in these mountains where you or I might conveniently disappear and never be heard of again.”
“Are you cooking up a yam, Gert, just to pass the time; for don’t you know that in this country you can’t shoot even a Kafir and stow him comfortably away without being tried for murder and hanged?”
The man shook his head, with a very humorous look upon his yellow face. It bordered almost upon amused contempt.
“It can be done, sir, and it was done. All the country knows it. Gideon Roux and Hermanus Delport only laugh. Not a man in the Wildschutsberg or the Rooi-Ruggensberg would dare accuse them, or dare come forward to give evidence.Nee, sir, not a man, white, brown, or black. There are veryschelmBoers in these mountains, and whoever tried to stir up that affair his life would not be worth a tickey. They would shoot him as they did the Kafir.”
Colvin reined in his horse to the slowest of foot-paces, and stared at the cleft as though struck with an idea.
“Have you ever been into that hole, Gert?”
“Nee, sir.”
“Then how do you know there is a rock in there the Kafir could jump on to escape Gideon Roux’s dogs?”
“That is the story, Baas.”
“Well, I’m going to have a look inside there. You remain here with the horses, and if anyone passes you can say I have gone after a reebok under the krantz.”
The ascent, though steep, was not long, and soon Colvin was standing within the mouth of the hole. It was a jagged fissure—running about twenty feet into the cliff, then narrowing to a low tunnel of about ten more.
Yes, this was quite correct. There was a rock—or rather a boulder. Colvin pictured, by the light of a flaming vesta, the hunted man standing gingerly on the apex of this to avoid the excited springs and snaps of the dogs. There was no sign, however, of any human remains—but—wait. Hallo! what was this?
The tunnel, which narrowed in from the end of the fissure, was half blocked. Colvin lighted another vesta, and bent down. Through the piled-up dust he made out what looked like a square rectangular stone. Stone? No—it was wood. It was one of three long flat packing-cases, piled one on top of the other. His nerves tingled with excitement. What discovery was he on the point of making? At any rate, whatever it might be, he would make it.
Now that his vision was accustomed to the semi-gloom he had no need of artificial light. The glimmering that entered from the outer day was sufficient. He hauled out the uppermost case. But how to open it? That might be done. Fortunately, he was provided with a large pocket-knife, containing various appliances which included a strong screwdriver. What was he going to discover? Human remains? Perhaps. Why, there might be others stowed away in like manner; victims of the wild and lawless inhabitants of this remote mountain district.
Then it occurred to him that the chest was very heavy. What on earth could it contain, and, by the way, what right had he to pry into its contents? For a moment he paused. But the curiosity and excitement attending upon this discovery were too great. Possibly, even, these chests and their contents had lain there for years and years unknown to anybody—even to the owner of the wild, and stony, and scattered stock-run on which they were hidden, but remembering Gert’s story that did not seem likely. Anyway, he would share the mystery with whoever held it. That could do no harm to anybody.
The lid was strongly screwed down. A few minutes of vigorous perspiring work and it was up. Whatever the contents were, they were protected by a thick wrapper of oilskin. This he proceeded to unwind, but carefully, so as to be able to replace it readily. Then a quantity of tow, also well oiled, and then—
No human remains, no shining coins, no old and massive silver, no treasure of any kind met his eager gaze. But there, in the top of the box, lay several rifles in a row.
He took one out, carried it as near the light of day as he dared go, and examined it. The weapon was one of the newest pattern—a Mauser. The others on the top layers were all alike. Allowing for the depth of the chest, he reckoned that it must contain at least a couple of dozen rifles. Here was a discovery. What was the meaning of this secret armoury? There could be only one. For only one purpose could these weapons be stowed away thus in the caves of the rocks—for the arming of the rebel Boers when the word went forth for them to rise, and join their brethren in the Transvaal and Free State, to throw off the British yoke from the Zambesi to Cape Agulhas.
Replacing the rifle, he rapidly screwed down the case, and stowed it away in the hole whence he had taken it, carefully piling up the dust and loose earth against it and the others so as to obviate all trace of interference. Hardly had he done so than the sound of hoof-strokes and harsh voices without struck upon his ear. Peering cautiously forth, he beheld, down upon the track from which he had ascended, two armed and mounted Boers, and they were in close confabulation with Gert Bondelzwart, his retainer.
Chapter Seven.An Evil Ambush.Standing there within the cave, which had now become his hiding-place, Colvin Kershaw was conscious of very mingled feelings. His hiding-place! Why should he be in hiding? why should he not go forth? Only that to do so would place his life in very serious jeopardy—not at the moment perhaps, for they would hardly venture to murder him openly and in broad daylight; besides, he had his revolver on. No, it would be afterwards, when they could waylay him at some unexpected part of the track—and what was the use of a revolver against the rifles of two or more cleverly ambushed foes? They could shoot him down without the slightest risk to themselves, and shoot him down he knew they would, and that without a moment’s hesitation, once they became aware that he had discovered their perilous because treasonable secret. He would never get out of the mountains alive.Nor was it reassuring when he satisfied himself as to the identity of the new arrivals, for they were none other than Gideon Roux himself and Hermanus Delport, the big Dutchman who had fallen foul of Frank Wenlock at the roadside inn. Both bore characters of evil repute.Would they never go on? They were talking voluminously, but were too far off for the burden of their words to travel. The big man was holding his rifle aloft as though threatening Gert with the butt thereof; but the Griqua stood his ground, calm and unintimidated. Would they never go on? Colvin felt his position growing more and more ignominious. Then again, what if they should conclude to come up and investigate? But they did not. To his intense relief they put their horses into the track again and cantered off in the direction whither he himself was bound.“VeryschelmBoer, Gideon Roux, sir,” said Gert, in reply to his master’s questioning. “They asked where my Baas was, and I told them gone after a reebok. They laughed over an Englishman shooting reebok with a revolver, when he could not even shoot anything with a rifle. Then, Baas, Hermanus he said I was a lying Hottentot, and threatened to knock my brains out with the butt of his gun. He said Hottentots and Englishmen were equally liars.”“Well, it’s of no consequence. But I’m afraid the chances of getting my money out of Gideon Roux to-day are very poor.”“Does Baas want to get money out of Gideon Roux, then?”“Of courseIdo, you ass. He hasn’t paid for those sheep yet.”“One hundred and twenty-five pounds, Baas. If I had ten pounds I would not offer it for the chance of that hundred and twenty-five pounds;” and Gert shook his head, puckering his face into the most whimsical expression.“Well, Gert, I believe you’re right. However, I may get some of it. But I don’t think we shall see Gideon. Now that he knows I’m coming up he won’t be at home.”The contrast between Ratels Hoek and Gideon Roux’ farm was about in proportion to that between their respective owners. A long, low building, with dirty whitewashed walls and thatched roof, standing against a bleak and desolate hill-slope—the front door opening in two parts—dilapidated stone kraals, situated on the slope aforesaid, so that in time of the rains all the drainage thence rushed round the back wall of the house—some draggle-tailed poultry, and two or three fever-stricken sheep—this is what Colvin saw as he rode up to his destination. The while, the air was thick with an awful combination of adjacent dead goat and a partly decomposed oxhide, in process of preparation for the making of reims.Even as he had expected, Gideon Roux was not at home. His wife, a large, fat, and albeit quite young, already shapeless person, untidy and slatternly of attire, came forward and tendered a moist paw, with the simple salutation “Daag!” or “good-day”—an example followed by her sister, who was a replica of herself though a trifle more shapely and less slovenly but not less awkward. Several brats, in varying stages of dirt, hung around, finger in mouth, gaping at the new arrival. There were some strange Boers there too, with whom Colvin exchanged greetings; but their manner was awkward and constrained. It was a relief to him when his hostess declared that dinner was ready.It was an appalling meal to the civilised palate and digestion that to which they now sat down. There was a stew, fearfully and wonderfully made, of leathery goat, sweetened to a nauseating point with quince jam, and, for vegetable, boiled pumpkin, containing almost as much water as pumpkin. The cloth was excessively grimy, and, worse still, bore many an ancient stain which showed that the day of its last washing must have been lost in the mists of antiquity, and there was no salt. The coffee, moreover, tasted like a decoction of split peas, and was plentifully interwoven with hair, and straw as from the thatch. The women did not sit down to table with them, but handed in the dishes from the kitchen, and then sat and waited until the men had done.Through all her natural stolidity it struck Colvin that both the countenance and manner of his hostess wore a flurried, not to say scared, look. She seemed to try and avoid conversation with him; and it squared with the fact of Gideon Roux being from home. Could any information be got out of her? To this end he began to question her in an artless conversational way.“Gideon will be in directly, Juffrouw?”“Nee, Mynheer Kershaw. He will not be in. He left home yesterday morning and I do not expect him back until to-morrow night.”“So? That is strange. Why, I thought I saw him just now, the other side of thepoort—just half an hour’s ride from here. He was coming in this direction too.”“Nee, nee—that cannot be.” And the look of alarm upon the woman’s face seemed to deepen.“Strange that. Why, I even recognised the man who was riding with him. It looked like Hermanus Delport.”There was no mistaking the effect this time. She looked downright hideously scared. It could not be, she reiterated. He must have been mistaken. And then to cover her confusion she turned away to a cupboard, and, unlocking it, brought out a decanter of Boer brandy, which she placed upon the table.“Maagtig, kerel!” cried one of the Dutchmen, seizing the bottle gleefully, and pouring out a copioussoepje. “It is true you must have been seeingspoeks. Thepoortis said to be haunted, you know.”Colvin fell into the humour of the thing seemingly, and replied in like bantering vein. But he was thinking the while, and thinking hard. The fear evinced by Gideon Roux’ wife would not be manifested by a stolid practical Boer woman under the mere circumstances of a neighbour having come to press her husband for the payment of a by no means ruinous debt. It was something deeper than that. It was more like the demeanour of a naturally respectable and law-abiding person who was made the involuntary sharer of some grim and terrible secret, which she dared neither to divulge nor even hint at. It set him thinking, and the burden of his thoughts was that his return home should be effected as much as possible by daylight, and as far as possible by a different route.Now, Gideon Roux was no fool of a Boer, neither was his confederate Hermanus Delport, consequently, having disappeared over the neck in the direction of the former’s home, they proceeded to execute a backward manoeuvre. Leaving their horses standing about twenty yards the other side, and well out of sight, they stealthily retraced their steps until they could gain a point which commanded a view of Gert Bondelzwart and the two horses under his charge. Not long had they been there before they saw all they wanted to see. They saw Colvin emerge from the cave under the krantz, and descend to where he had left his servant. But they did not wait until he had rejoined the latter. Mounting their horses, they sent those astonished animals along at a break-neck gallop, which brought them to the homestead fully twenty minutes earlier than the expected visitor. It took them less than five to execute their next move, which was to exchange their long Martinis for a Mauser rifle apiece—a weapon which had not then, openly at any rate, reached the Wildschutsberg section of country, and which they fished out from some hidden recess. Cartridges and a bottle of ‘dop’ they placed in a haversack, and with a significant injunction to their fellow-countrymen there gathered, to keep the Englishman talking and making merry as late as possible, they rode off into the veldt again, taking a line which would put them out of sight of the house in about three minutes.“He knows too much, that damned Englishman,” snarled Gideon Roux, shading a match to light his pipe, while his steed took him along at a fast “triple.” He was a sinister-looking, swarthy-faced Boer, with a short black beard and a great hooked nose like the beak of a bird of prey. “We must teach him—him and his Hottentot—not to come pushing his snout into other people’s affairs.”“That is so,” assented the other. “But, Gideon, what if there is a noise made about it, and they are found afterwards? The English will hang us. And he is a friend of Oom Stephanus.”“Maagtig! By the time they are found the English will not be here to hang anybody, and we,ou’ maat(old chum)—we shall have deserved the thanks of all true patriots for having put out of the way an enemy of our country. Oom Stephanus—well, he is a patriot now, his own nephew, Adrian De la Rey, told me so. What is one cursed Englishman more than another to a good patriot. He cannot be a friend to such.”“That is so,” replied the big Boer laconically.For about an hour they kept on their way, and their way was a rough one, for they avoided the regular track, winding in and out among the mountains, now putting their horses up a steep boulder-strewn slope, then being obliged to dismount in order to lead the animals down a kind of natural rock staircase. Finally, they drew rein upon a neck, where, lying between two great boulders, themselves utterly invisible from below, they could command the broken, winding, rocky track for some little distance, either way.“He cannot be here yet,” said Gideon Roux as he scanned the road, which, like a snake, wound along the valley beneath. “Hans Vermaak will see to that. Only, I hope Katrina will not let them have too much to drink. Hans is quite fool enough to get drunk and jolly, and insist on the Englishman stopping the night Hans is the devil to drink, and then he becomes jolly. That is where he is such a fool.”They hid the horses well down over the other side of the ridge, lest the approach of the other animals should cause them to neigh, then returned to their positions under the rocks. The road was about three hundred yards beneath, and on the other side of it was the river bed, now dry. This circumstance, too, came into the strategy of the murderous pair.“See now, Mani,” (Hermanus abbreviated), said Gideon Roux. “If we shoot as we always shoot, both will drop into the river bed. And to-night,” looking upward at a black cloud which was thickly and gradually spreading, “the river will come down. I will take the Englishman, and you take the Hottentot.”“Ja, but I am not so sure with these damned Mausers,” growled Hermanus Delport, looking up and down his weapon. “I might miss—then where would we be? We had better have kept to our old Martinis. We understand them.”“Nee, nee. It comes to the same thing, I tell you, and if you miss you can go on shooting until youraak. I knowIshan’t miss.Maagtig, kerel! What are you doing? Put away that pipe!”But Hermanus protested he was not going to do without his smoke for all the adjectival English in Africa or in England either, and it took at least ten minutes of his confederate’s time and talk to persuade him that not only the spark but the smoke of a pipe was visible for any distance in the clear, yet half-gloomy atmosphere then prevailing. For the leaden lour of the heavens pointed to the coming of a storm.In effect the surroundings were very much in harmony with the dark deed of blood which these two miscreants were here to perpetrate. The wild and rugged recesses of the Wildschutsbergen, sparsely inhabited and but seldom travelled, spread around in grim, forbidding desolation. Great krantzes towered skyward, rearing up from the apex of smooth boulder-strewn grass slopes, and here and there a lofty coffee-canister shaped cone, turret-headed, and belted round with the same smooth cliff-face, stood like a giant sentinel. Below, the valleys, deep and rugged, seamed with dongas, and that through which the track lay, skirting the now dry bed of the Sneeuw River. No sign of life was upon this abode of desolation; no grazing flock, or strayklompjeof horses, not even a bird, springing chirruping from the grass; and away yonder the further crags stood against a background of inky cloud, which, gradually working nearer, amid low mutterings of thunder, was bringing the storm which should act as accomplice in hiding the slain victims of the two ambushed murderers.“That is right,” chuckled Gideon Roux, rubbing his hands. “The river will come down to-night like the devil. By this time to-morrow the Englishman and his Hottentot will be nearly at the sea. It is hundreds of miles off, but a flooded river travels as quick as a train.”“What if they are stranded half-way?” said the other, with an evil sneer.“Then the jackals will eat them. Either way it matters nothing.”Darker and darker it grew. The storm cloud began to throw out loose masses of flying scud, through which the moon now and again shone out in fitful gleam. Still, to these two their prey came not in sight.“I like not this,” growled Hermanus. “This is no light to shoot by. We may miss one or both, and to miss one is as bad as to miss both. Besides, the river may not take them down after all. We two may be hanged for to-night’s work, Gideon.”“Hanged? Oh, yes! See now, Mani, why I would have it done with Mausers. Their bullet makes a small hole, our Martini bullet makes a large hole. And there is not a Mauser or a Lee-Metford in the Wildschutsberg. Afterwards our guns are examined, and they are the old Martinis. Our bullet does not fit the hole. Now, do you not see, youeselkop?”“Ja, I see. But—stil, man. Here they come.”A clink of the hoof of a shod horse coming down the track was borne faintly upward. The two assassins crouched in their ambush, a tigerish glare in their eyes. Their pieces were levelled.“Ready, Hermanus,” whispered Gideon Roux. “When they come six paces the other side of yon white stone, then shoot.”
Standing there within the cave, which had now become his hiding-place, Colvin Kershaw was conscious of very mingled feelings. His hiding-place! Why should he be in hiding? why should he not go forth? Only that to do so would place his life in very serious jeopardy—not at the moment perhaps, for they would hardly venture to murder him openly and in broad daylight; besides, he had his revolver on. No, it would be afterwards, when they could waylay him at some unexpected part of the track—and what was the use of a revolver against the rifles of two or more cleverly ambushed foes? They could shoot him down without the slightest risk to themselves, and shoot him down he knew they would, and that without a moment’s hesitation, once they became aware that he had discovered their perilous because treasonable secret. He would never get out of the mountains alive.
Nor was it reassuring when he satisfied himself as to the identity of the new arrivals, for they were none other than Gideon Roux himself and Hermanus Delport, the big Dutchman who had fallen foul of Frank Wenlock at the roadside inn. Both bore characters of evil repute.
Would they never go on? They were talking voluminously, but were too far off for the burden of their words to travel. The big man was holding his rifle aloft as though threatening Gert with the butt thereof; but the Griqua stood his ground, calm and unintimidated. Would they never go on? Colvin felt his position growing more and more ignominious. Then again, what if they should conclude to come up and investigate? But they did not. To his intense relief they put their horses into the track again and cantered off in the direction whither he himself was bound.
“VeryschelmBoer, Gideon Roux, sir,” said Gert, in reply to his master’s questioning. “They asked where my Baas was, and I told them gone after a reebok. They laughed over an Englishman shooting reebok with a revolver, when he could not even shoot anything with a rifle. Then, Baas, Hermanus he said I was a lying Hottentot, and threatened to knock my brains out with the butt of his gun. He said Hottentots and Englishmen were equally liars.”
“Well, it’s of no consequence. But I’m afraid the chances of getting my money out of Gideon Roux to-day are very poor.”
“Does Baas want to get money out of Gideon Roux, then?”
“Of courseIdo, you ass. He hasn’t paid for those sheep yet.”
“One hundred and twenty-five pounds, Baas. If I had ten pounds I would not offer it for the chance of that hundred and twenty-five pounds;” and Gert shook his head, puckering his face into the most whimsical expression.
“Well, Gert, I believe you’re right. However, I may get some of it. But I don’t think we shall see Gideon. Now that he knows I’m coming up he won’t be at home.”
The contrast between Ratels Hoek and Gideon Roux’ farm was about in proportion to that between their respective owners. A long, low building, with dirty whitewashed walls and thatched roof, standing against a bleak and desolate hill-slope—the front door opening in two parts—dilapidated stone kraals, situated on the slope aforesaid, so that in time of the rains all the drainage thence rushed round the back wall of the house—some draggle-tailed poultry, and two or three fever-stricken sheep—this is what Colvin saw as he rode up to his destination. The while, the air was thick with an awful combination of adjacent dead goat and a partly decomposed oxhide, in process of preparation for the making of reims.
Even as he had expected, Gideon Roux was not at home. His wife, a large, fat, and albeit quite young, already shapeless person, untidy and slatternly of attire, came forward and tendered a moist paw, with the simple salutation “Daag!” or “good-day”—an example followed by her sister, who was a replica of herself though a trifle more shapely and less slovenly but not less awkward. Several brats, in varying stages of dirt, hung around, finger in mouth, gaping at the new arrival. There were some strange Boers there too, with whom Colvin exchanged greetings; but their manner was awkward and constrained. It was a relief to him when his hostess declared that dinner was ready.
It was an appalling meal to the civilised palate and digestion that to which they now sat down. There was a stew, fearfully and wonderfully made, of leathery goat, sweetened to a nauseating point with quince jam, and, for vegetable, boiled pumpkin, containing almost as much water as pumpkin. The cloth was excessively grimy, and, worse still, bore many an ancient stain which showed that the day of its last washing must have been lost in the mists of antiquity, and there was no salt. The coffee, moreover, tasted like a decoction of split peas, and was plentifully interwoven with hair, and straw as from the thatch. The women did not sit down to table with them, but handed in the dishes from the kitchen, and then sat and waited until the men had done.
Through all her natural stolidity it struck Colvin that both the countenance and manner of his hostess wore a flurried, not to say scared, look. She seemed to try and avoid conversation with him; and it squared with the fact of Gideon Roux being from home. Could any information be got out of her? To this end he began to question her in an artless conversational way.
“Gideon will be in directly, Juffrouw?”
“Nee, Mynheer Kershaw. He will not be in. He left home yesterday morning and I do not expect him back until to-morrow night.”
“So? That is strange. Why, I thought I saw him just now, the other side of thepoort—just half an hour’s ride from here. He was coming in this direction too.”
“Nee, nee—that cannot be.” And the look of alarm upon the woman’s face seemed to deepen.
“Strange that. Why, I even recognised the man who was riding with him. It looked like Hermanus Delport.”
There was no mistaking the effect this time. She looked downright hideously scared. It could not be, she reiterated. He must have been mistaken. And then to cover her confusion she turned away to a cupboard, and, unlocking it, brought out a decanter of Boer brandy, which she placed upon the table.
“Maagtig, kerel!” cried one of the Dutchmen, seizing the bottle gleefully, and pouring out a copioussoepje. “It is true you must have been seeingspoeks. Thepoortis said to be haunted, you know.”
Colvin fell into the humour of the thing seemingly, and replied in like bantering vein. But he was thinking the while, and thinking hard. The fear evinced by Gideon Roux’ wife would not be manifested by a stolid practical Boer woman under the mere circumstances of a neighbour having come to press her husband for the payment of a by no means ruinous debt. It was something deeper than that. It was more like the demeanour of a naturally respectable and law-abiding person who was made the involuntary sharer of some grim and terrible secret, which she dared neither to divulge nor even hint at. It set him thinking, and the burden of his thoughts was that his return home should be effected as much as possible by daylight, and as far as possible by a different route.
Now, Gideon Roux was no fool of a Boer, neither was his confederate Hermanus Delport, consequently, having disappeared over the neck in the direction of the former’s home, they proceeded to execute a backward manoeuvre. Leaving their horses standing about twenty yards the other side, and well out of sight, they stealthily retraced their steps until they could gain a point which commanded a view of Gert Bondelzwart and the two horses under his charge. Not long had they been there before they saw all they wanted to see. They saw Colvin emerge from the cave under the krantz, and descend to where he had left his servant. But they did not wait until he had rejoined the latter. Mounting their horses, they sent those astonished animals along at a break-neck gallop, which brought them to the homestead fully twenty minutes earlier than the expected visitor. It took them less than five to execute their next move, which was to exchange their long Martinis for a Mauser rifle apiece—a weapon which had not then, openly at any rate, reached the Wildschutsberg section of country, and which they fished out from some hidden recess. Cartridges and a bottle of ‘dop’ they placed in a haversack, and with a significant injunction to their fellow-countrymen there gathered, to keep the Englishman talking and making merry as late as possible, they rode off into the veldt again, taking a line which would put them out of sight of the house in about three minutes.
“He knows too much, that damned Englishman,” snarled Gideon Roux, shading a match to light his pipe, while his steed took him along at a fast “triple.” He was a sinister-looking, swarthy-faced Boer, with a short black beard and a great hooked nose like the beak of a bird of prey. “We must teach him—him and his Hottentot—not to come pushing his snout into other people’s affairs.”
“That is so,” assented the other. “But, Gideon, what if there is a noise made about it, and they are found afterwards? The English will hang us. And he is a friend of Oom Stephanus.”
“Maagtig! By the time they are found the English will not be here to hang anybody, and we,ou’ maat(old chum)—we shall have deserved the thanks of all true patriots for having put out of the way an enemy of our country. Oom Stephanus—well, he is a patriot now, his own nephew, Adrian De la Rey, told me so. What is one cursed Englishman more than another to a good patriot. He cannot be a friend to such.”
“That is so,” replied the big Boer laconically.
For about an hour they kept on their way, and their way was a rough one, for they avoided the regular track, winding in and out among the mountains, now putting their horses up a steep boulder-strewn slope, then being obliged to dismount in order to lead the animals down a kind of natural rock staircase. Finally, they drew rein upon a neck, where, lying between two great boulders, themselves utterly invisible from below, they could command the broken, winding, rocky track for some little distance, either way.
“He cannot be here yet,” said Gideon Roux as he scanned the road, which, like a snake, wound along the valley beneath. “Hans Vermaak will see to that. Only, I hope Katrina will not let them have too much to drink. Hans is quite fool enough to get drunk and jolly, and insist on the Englishman stopping the night Hans is the devil to drink, and then he becomes jolly. That is where he is such a fool.”
They hid the horses well down over the other side of the ridge, lest the approach of the other animals should cause them to neigh, then returned to their positions under the rocks. The road was about three hundred yards beneath, and on the other side of it was the river bed, now dry. This circumstance, too, came into the strategy of the murderous pair.
“See now, Mani,” (Hermanus abbreviated), said Gideon Roux. “If we shoot as we always shoot, both will drop into the river bed. And to-night,” looking upward at a black cloud which was thickly and gradually spreading, “the river will come down. I will take the Englishman, and you take the Hottentot.”
“Ja, but I am not so sure with these damned Mausers,” growled Hermanus Delport, looking up and down his weapon. “I might miss—then where would we be? We had better have kept to our old Martinis. We understand them.”
“Nee, nee. It comes to the same thing, I tell you, and if you miss you can go on shooting until youraak. I knowIshan’t miss.Maagtig, kerel! What are you doing? Put away that pipe!”
But Hermanus protested he was not going to do without his smoke for all the adjectival English in Africa or in England either, and it took at least ten minutes of his confederate’s time and talk to persuade him that not only the spark but the smoke of a pipe was visible for any distance in the clear, yet half-gloomy atmosphere then prevailing. For the leaden lour of the heavens pointed to the coming of a storm.
In effect the surroundings were very much in harmony with the dark deed of blood which these two miscreants were here to perpetrate. The wild and rugged recesses of the Wildschutsbergen, sparsely inhabited and but seldom travelled, spread around in grim, forbidding desolation. Great krantzes towered skyward, rearing up from the apex of smooth boulder-strewn grass slopes, and here and there a lofty coffee-canister shaped cone, turret-headed, and belted round with the same smooth cliff-face, stood like a giant sentinel. Below, the valleys, deep and rugged, seamed with dongas, and that through which the track lay, skirting the now dry bed of the Sneeuw River. No sign of life was upon this abode of desolation; no grazing flock, or strayklompjeof horses, not even a bird, springing chirruping from the grass; and away yonder the further crags stood against a background of inky cloud, which, gradually working nearer, amid low mutterings of thunder, was bringing the storm which should act as accomplice in hiding the slain victims of the two ambushed murderers.
“That is right,” chuckled Gideon Roux, rubbing his hands. “The river will come down to-night like the devil. By this time to-morrow the Englishman and his Hottentot will be nearly at the sea. It is hundreds of miles off, but a flooded river travels as quick as a train.”
“What if they are stranded half-way?” said the other, with an evil sneer.
“Then the jackals will eat them. Either way it matters nothing.”
Darker and darker it grew. The storm cloud began to throw out loose masses of flying scud, through which the moon now and again shone out in fitful gleam. Still, to these two their prey came not in sight.
“I like not this,” growled Hermanus. “This is no light to shoot by. We may miss one or both, and to miss one is as bad as to miss both. Besides, the river may not take them down after all. We two may be hanged for to-night’s work, Gideon.”
“Hanged? Oh, yes! See now, Mani, why I would have it done with Mausers. Their bullet makes a small hole, our Martini bullet makes a large hole. And there is not a Mauser or a Lee-Metford in the Wildschutsberg. Afterwards our guns are examined, and they are the old Martinis. Our bullet does not fit the hole. Now, do you not see, youeselkop?”
“Ja, I see. But—stil, man. Here they come.”
A clink of the hoof of a shod horse coming down the track was borne faintly upward. The two assassins crouched in their ambush, a tigerish glare in their eyes. Their pieces were levelled.
“Ready, Hermanus,” whispered Gideon Roux. “When they come six paces the other side of yon white stone, then shoot.”