pulled up with a half-suppressed exclamation, and stood staring hard at something on ahead.
“Dern my skin!” said he slowly and softly, as I came up to him. He was a slow-spoken Yankee. “Say, look there! Don’t it beat hell?”
In the direction indicated, partly hidden by the scant foliage of a thorn-tree, a man was sitting on a yellow portmanteau reading a book. The sight was unusual, and it brought the unemotional Yankee to a standstill and set us both smiling. The man was dressed in a sort of clerk’s everyday get-up, even to the bowler hat, and as he sat there he held overhead an old black silk umbrella to protect him from such of the sun’s rays as penetrated the thorn-bush. He must have become conscious of the presence of life by the subtle instinct which we all know and can’t explain, for almost immediately he raised his glance and looked us straight in the eyes. He rose and came towards us, laying aside the umbrella, but keeping his place in the book.
The scene was too ludicrous not to provoke a smile, and the young fellow – he could not have been above twenty-three – mistaking its import, raised his hat politely and wished us “good-afternoon.”
He spoke English, but with a strong German accent, and his dress, his open manner, his ready smiles, and, above all, his politeness, proclaimed him very much a stranger to those parts. Key murmured a line from a compatriot: “Green peas has come to market, and vegetables is riz.”
“You have come mit der waggons? You make der transport? Not?” he asked us, following up the usual formula.
We told him it was so, and that we were for the fields, and reckoned to reach Matalha by sun-up. He too, he said, was going to the gold-fields, and would be a prospector; he was just waiting for his “boy,” who had gone back for something he had forgotten at the last place. He was going to walk to Moodie’s, he said. He “did make mit one transporter a contract to come by waggons; but it was a woman mit two childs what was leave behind, and dere was no more waggons, so he will walk. It was good to walk to make him strong for de prospect. Oh yes!”
We were used to meeting all sorts on the road, and they were pretty well all inclined to talk; but this one was so full it just bubbled out of him, and in his broken English he got off question on question, between times imparting scraps of information about himself and his hopes. He was clearly in earnest about his future, and he was so utterly unpractical, so hopelessly astray in his view of everything, that one could not but feel kindly towards him. We chatted with him until our waggons came up, when he again politely raised his hat as he said good-bye to us, and offered many thanks for the information about the road. As we moved on with the waggons, he turned to look down the road by which we had come, and said, apparently as an afterthought:
“You haf seen my ‘boy’ perhaps? Not? No! Soh! Good-bye – yes, good-bye!”
It does not take long for daylight to glide through dusk into darkness in the bush veld in South Africa, and even these few minutes spent in conversation had seen the light begin to fade from the sky as the sun disappeared. The road was good and clear of rocks and stumps, so we hopped onto the most comfortable waggon, and talked while the oxen plodded slowly along.
We had quite a large party that trip, for, besides Gowan and myself, who owned the waggons, we had three traders from Swazie country – old friends of ours who had come down to Delagoa to buy goods. We had all arranged to stand in together in a big venture of running loads through Swazieland to the gold-fields later on in the season; in fact, the trip we were then making was more or less a trial one to see how the land lay, and how much we could venture in the big coup.
Gowan, the other transport-rider, and I always travelled together. We were not partners exactly, but in a country like that it was good to have a friend, and we understood each other. There were no two ways about him; he was a white man through and through. The two Mackays were brothers; they had left Scotland some years before to join a farming scheme “suitable for gentlemen’s sons with a little capital,” as the circular and advertisements said. They had given it best, however, and gone trading long before I met them. The other member of our party was the one with whom I had been walking. He was an American, and had been everything and everywhere, most lately a trader in Swazie country. We generally called him the Judge.
As the waggons rumbled along Key was giving a more or less accurate account of our conversation with the stranger.
It was very amusing, even more amusing than the original, for I am bound to say that with him a story did not suffer in the telling. It was only Gowan who didn’t seem to see anything to laugh at in the affair. He sat there dangling his legs over the buck-rails, chewing a long grass stalk, and humming all out of tune. He had a habit of doing that, growling with it. Presently, as conversation flagged, the tune got worse and his growling took the shape of a reference to “giving a poor devil a lift.”
I frankly confessed that I simply had not thought of it, and that was all. As, however, Gowan continued growling about “beastly shame” and “poor devil of a greenhorn,” etc, Key answered dryly.
“Waal, I did think of it; but, first place, they ain’t my waggons – ”
Gowan grunted out, “Dam rot!”
“And second place,” continued Key placidly, “considerin’ the kind o’ cargo you’ve got aboard, and where it’s going to, I didn’t reckon you wanted any passengers!”
“I don’t want passengers,” said Gowan gloomily; “but any damned fool knows that that fellow’ll never see food or blankets or ‘boy’ again on the face of God’s earth. Kaffir carriers don’t forget things at outspans. No, not any that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a good few.”
Old Gowan took up the grass stem again, and chewed and tugged at it, and made occasional kicks at passing bushes, by way of showing a general and emphatic disapproval. No one said anything; it was Gowan’s way to growl at everything, and nobody ever took much notice. He was the most good-natured, kindly old growler that ever lived. He growled as some sturdy old dogs do when you pat them – they like it.
In this particular case, of course, he had reason. It is not that we were inhospitable or unfeeling, but years of roughing it had, I suppose, dulled our impressions of the first night alone in the veld, and we had not seen it as Gowan did. Life of the sort we led, no doubt, develops the sterling good qualities of one’s nature, but quick sympathy and its kindred delicate traits are rather growths of refinement and quiet, and it betrayed no real want of feeling that we had not taken Gowan’s view.
There could be no doubt, of course, that the Kaffir boy had bolted with the blankets and food, for we had noticed that the young German had nothing left when we saw him but that yellow portmanteau, and our knowledge of the Delagoa Bay “boy” forbade acceptance of the theory that he had gone empty-handed.
We rumbled heavily along for a bit, and after a while Gowan resumed, in a tone of deeper grumbling and more surly dissatisfaction than before:
“Like as not the silly young fool ’ll lose himself looking for water, and die in the Bush, like that one Joe Roberts brought up last season. Why, I remember when – ”
“Grave o’ the Prophet!” exclaimed Robbie, starting up in mock alarm; “he’s going to tell us that dismal yarn about the parson chap who hunted beetles, and was found after a week’s search with two of his most valuable specimens feeding on his eyes. Skip, sonnie, skip! and fetch up your German friend ’fore the old man gets under way.”
Key dropped off the buck-rails, as the drivers shouted their “Aanhouws” to the cattle to give them a breather, kicked his legs loose a bit, dusted down his trousers quietly, and, smiling good-humouredly at Gowan, “guessed it was better business to hump that
