I set out together at a brisk pace, well knowing how poor was our chance of catching up to the waggons again before the midnight outspan.
Key, who was always tickled by Gowan’s growling tones, remarked after we had walked for some minutes:
“Sling hell like a nigger parson, you know, can the old ’un, but soft and harmless as a woman.”
After half an hour’s brisk walking, we caught the unsteady flicker of a fire through the straggling thorns, and we found our friend sitting tailorwise before it, making vigorous but futile attempts to wisp aside the smoke that would go his way. His look of mild curiosity at the sound of our voices wakened up into welcome when he recognised us, and he at once became interested in the reason of our return.
“You haf lose something – not? I, too, will look for you,” he said, jumping up eagerly; but we reassured him on that point, and inquired in turn whether his “boy” had returned, and cross-questioned him as to the when and wherefore of his leaving.
The Kaffir-bearer, he said, had left him that morning during the after-breakfast trek.
“Ten hours gone, by Jimmie!” muttered the Judge.
“And you have waited here since then?” I asked.
“Oh yes, yes! I read to learn de English. It is – ”
“Had any scoff?”
“Please?”
“Had any grub – anything to eat or drink?” explained Key, illustrating his meaning by graphic touches on mouth and belt.
“No, no; I am not hunger. Also it is good that I eat not. It make me use for the prospect.”
Key smiled gently, and said, with a quaint judicial air:
“Waal, I don’t know as that’s quite necessary; but ef you kin stick it out till that nigger o’ yours comes back, I guess you’ll do for most any camp you’ll strike in this country. Say! Has he got the blankets? Yes! And the grub? So! An’ – er – mebbe you didn’t give him money as well?”
“I haf give him one pound to pay the passport, which he forgot. He say policeman will take him if he shows not the ticket. But he will come bring to me the change. He is ein goot boy, and he speaken English feul goot; but perhaps something can happen, and that policeman haf take him, I think.”
Even in a new-comer such credulity was a revelation. I could not help smiling, but the Judge’s clear-cut, impassive features never changed; only, at the mention of the “boy’s” lingual accomplishments, he winked solemnly at me.
The Judge brought matters to a practical issue by telling our friend that he “had much better wait at our waggons for the good boy that speaks English so well.”
“It ain’t,” said Key, “es if he couldn’t find you. A Kaffir kin find you most anywhere if he wants to – ’specially them English-speakin’ ones,” he added, with a twinkle in his eyes.
Key did not wait for any reply, but turned the “yaller gripsack” over and looked at the name, “Adolf Soltké,” painted in big white letters.
“Your name?” he asked in chaff, rather than that he doubted it.
“My name, yea Soltké – Adolf Soltké – coom from Germany, but in der colonie I was leetle times.”
“Took you for Amurrikan,” said the Judge, without a vestige of a smile.
I looked hastily at Soltké, feeling that his broken, halting English should have protected him from such outrageous fooling, but my solicitude was misplaced. Soltké calmly, but firmly, disclaimed all knowledge of America, and repeated that he was a German.
Key shouldered the portmanteau with the curt suggestion, “Waal, let’s git!” and as our friend – except by his protestations of gratitude and wild endeavours to carry the whole of the kit himself – offered no hindrance to the proposed scheme, we marched along briskly to overtake the waggons.
A bullock-waggon is a slow one to travel with, but a bad one to catch, as anyone knows who has tried it; and it was close on midnight when, tired and dusty, we came suddenly on the waggons outspanned in a small opening in the Bush.
The silence was absolutely ghostly, except when now and then a bullock would give a big long sigh, or a sappy stick in the fire would crack and hiss.
Gowan was sitting over the fire on a three-legged rough-wood stool, head in hands and elbows on knees, with the odd jets of flame lighting up his solemn old face and shaggy brown beard. The others had turned in. He stood up slowly as we came up and extended a hand to Soltké, saying baldly:
“How are ye?”
Our friend took the inquiry in a literal sense, and was engaged in answering it, when Gowan cut in with a remark that it was “time to be in bed,” and, accepting his own hint, he hooked his finger in the “reimpje” of his camp-stool and strolled off to where his blankets were already spread under one of the waggons.
As he turned, he pointed with his foot to the fire, growling out that there was a billy of tea and some stew warmed up “for him” (looking back at Soltké), and adding, “Bread’s in the grub-box. ’Night!” he turned in.
It was just like him to remember these things, for in our routine there was as a rule no eating during the night outspan. It was breakfast after the morning trek, and supper before the evening one. Gowan had also thrown out a couple of blankets, and between us we made up pretty well for the lost bedding; so Soltké was installed as one of the party. It says something for him that, in spite of our eight-mile walk and that yellow portmanteau, the verdict under our waggons that night was: “Seems a decent sort, after all, and it would ha’ been a bit rough to leave him to shift for himself.”
Soltké’s stupendous greenness should have disarmed chaff; and, indeed, at first we all felt that fooling him was like misleading a child: there was no fun to be got out of it. He believed anything that was told him. He accepted literally those palpable exaggerations which are not expected or wanted to be believed. He took for gospel the account of the Munchausen of the Bush veld who told how his team of donkeys had been disturbed by a lion during the early morning trek, and how, to his infinite surprise and alarm, he found that the savage brute had actually eaten his way into one donkey’s place, and when day broke was found still pulling in the team, to the great dismay of the other members. He was anxious to make a personal experiment of the efficacy of dew taken off a bullock’s horn, which we had recommended as an infallible snake charm. At considerable risk he had secured the dew, and the scene of Soltké’s struggling with the bewildered bullock at early dawn one morning was one to be remembered. However, he pledged himself not to carry the experiment further without the assistance of one of us, and a day or two later we removed immediate risk by losing his phial of dew. I am convinced that he would have tried the experiment on any snake he might have met, and with absolute confidence as to the result.
His mind was such as one would expect in a child who had known neither mental nor physical fear. He seemed absolutely void, not only of personal knowledge of evil, but even of that cognisance of its existence which shows itself in a disposition to seek corroborative evidence, to consult probabilities, and to inquire into motives. I am convinced that Soltké never questioned a motive in his life, nor ever hesitated to accept as a fact anything told in apparent seriousness. Irony and sarcasm were to him as to a child or a savage. He was intensely literal, single-minded and direct, and perfectly fearless in thought, word or act. Such a disposition in
