 Chapter 1 of the Art Span Tales of South Africa by J. Percy Fitzpatrick This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Read by Sally McConnell in Betteys Bay, South Africa in May 2010 The Art Span Chapter 1 The Art Span There is no art in the telling that can equal the consummate art of the happening. It was a remark dropped by a forgotten someone in a prospectus hut one night, years and years ago, when we had exhausted snakes and hunting, lucky strikes and escapes, and had got away into coincidences. One of the party had been telling us an experience of his. He was introduced on the day he arrived to a man well known on the fields. It seemed quite impossible that they could have met before, for they compared dates and places for ten years back, and yet both were puzzled by the hazy suggestion of having seen the other before, and, in our friend's case, of something more definite. His remark to the other was, I can't help feeling that I saw you once in a devil of a fright somewhere, or dreamt it, I suppose. But this first feeling faded quickly away, and was utterly forgotten by both. Later on they shared a hut near Rhymer's Creek, and afterwards, when houses came into vogue, they lived for several years together, while the first impression was lying buried, but not dead. One day, in the process of swapping yarns, the other man was telling of the narrowest escape he ever had, and all due to such a simple little mistake. A ticket collector took the tickets at the wrong end of a footbridge. Instead of collecting them as the passengers from the train went onto the bridge, he took them as they were going off. The result was that the crowd of exertionists was too great for the little bridge, and slipped between the abutments, carrying some two hundred people into the river below, the narrator being one of them. It was then that the dormant idea stirred and awoke, jumped into life, and our friend put up his hands, as he had done fifteen years before when the little bridge in Bath dropped, and gasped out, My God! You were the other chap that hung onto the broken rail! That's where we met! That was what prompted the forgotten one to say after we had lapsed into silence, there is no art in the telling that can equal the consummate art of the happening. And I only recall the remark, because it must be my apology for telling plain truth, just as it happened. When a man has spent some years of his life, the years of young manhood they generally are, in the felt, in the wagon or tent or bush, it is an almost invariable rule that something which you can't define germinates in him, and never entirely dies until he does. When this thing, this instinct, feeling, craving, call it what you will, awakens as a periodically does, it becomes a madness, and they call it trek fever, and then, as an old friend used to say, you must trek or burst. There are many stories based on trek fever, but this is not one of them. And if you were to ask those who know them, or better still, get hold of any of the old hands, hard-headed, commonplace, unromantic specimens though they might be, who live in the felt, if you give them time to let it slip out unawares, you would find that every man jack of them would have something to say about the campfire. I do believe that the fascination within the fascination is the campfire in felt life, with its pleasant yawn swapping, and its long, pregnant, thoughtful silences no less enjoyable. The least loquacious individual in the world will be tempted to unfold a tale within the circle of a campfire's light. Everything is so quietly, unobtrusively sociable, and subjects are not too numerous in the felt, so that when a man has something apropos or interesting to tell, he commands an appreciative audience. Nobody bores, and nobody interrupts. Perhaps it is the half-lazy preference for playing the lisma, which everyone feels that is the best security against balls and interruptions. The charm of the life is indescribable, and none who have tasted it ever wary of it, ever forget it, or cease to feel the longing to return, when once they have quitted it. It was in ninety-one, the year after the pioneers cut their way through the bush with solute to guide them, like Michonaland. We followed their trail and lived again their anxious nights and days, when they, a small handful in a dense bush at the mercy of the Mattabilee thousands, did not know at what hour they would be passed on and massacred. We crossed the Lundee, and somewhere beyond where one of their worst nights was passed, we art spanned in peace and security, and gossiped over the ruins of ancient temples and the graves of modern pioneers. There were half a dozen of us, and we lay round the fire in lazy silence, too content to speak, simply living, and drinking in the indescribable glories of an ideal African night. It was someone knocking his pipe out and asking for the tobacco that broke the long silence, and the old Barbaternian, who had had to move to release the tobacco, looked round with the air of wanting someone to talk to. As no one gave any sign, he asked presently, Are you chaps asleep? No, came in clear wakeful voices with various degrees of promptness. I was just thinking, he said, refilling his pipe slowly, that this sort of thing, a night like this, you know, and all that, although it seems perfection to us, isn't really so perfect after all. It all depends on the point of view, you know. A night like this must be a perfect curse to a lion or a tiger, you know. Your sympathies are too wide, old man, said the surveyor. Chuck me alight, and console yourself that your predatory friends do well enough when others are miserable. Take a more human view. If you want an outlet for your native sympathy, you might heave me out a cushion, suggested another. I've made a pillow of a bucket and got a dent in my head. The thick cushion, old boy, and I'm with you so far as to say that the lions have a jolly hard time of it with so much fine weather. The Barbaternian lighted his pipe, and threw the cushion at the last speaker. Hmm! he grunted between puffs. I was really thinking of it from quite a human standpoint. The view of that poor devil who got lost here two months ago. Now, he couldn't have thought much of nights like these. Do you think he mused on their beauty? Oh! I heard something of him, said one. Lost for forty days in the wilderness, wasn't he, I remember? The coincidence struck me as peculiar. Yes, it was odd in a way. He was just forty days and forty nights. He went out with a rifle and five cartridges to kick up a diker along the river bank here, and somehow or other got astray toward sundown and lost his head completely. Five cartridges, seven matches, no grub, no coat, no compass, and no sabby. That's a fair start for a forty days picnic, isn't it? He resumed. Well, he fired off all his cartridges by dark, trying to signal to his camp, and then threw away his rifle. Fact! He broke the heads off two matches he was so shaking from fright before he realised that there were only seven altogether. But as he had nothing to cook, it didn't really make much difference whether he had matches or not. What? In wintertime, and with lions about? Yeah! Well, you get used to that. It was a bit frosty and sometimes wet, and at first the lions worried him a lot and treed him several nights. But he says that was nothing while the sense of being lost, dead he it alive remained. What's that? Live? Oh, he doesn't know himself how he lived, but we could pretty well tell by his condition when we found him. We were out shooting about five miles downstream, and on one of the sandy spits of the river we saw fresh footprints, nigger we thought, as it was barefoot. We wondered because there were no crawls near here, and we had seen no cattle spore or footpaths. I was on top of the bank every minute expecting a diker or bushback to make a break out, and, I tell you, I don't know when I got such a start, such a turn, I should say, as when I caught sight of a white face looking at me out of an ant-bear hole. Great Caesar! There was something so infernally uncanny, wild, and hunted in the look that I instinctively got the gun round to cover him if he came at me. When the others came up he crawled out, stark naked, sunburnt, scratched, shock-headed, still staring with that strange, hunted look, came up to us, and laughed. We led him back to our camp. He could tell nothing, could hardly understand any of our questions. He was quite dazed. His hands were cut and disfigured. The nails were torn off with burrowing for roots. We went to his den. It was a big ant-bear hole under an old tree and among rocks, a well-chosen spot. He had burrowed it out a bit, I think, and in a sort of pigeonhole or socket on the side of it there were a few nuts, and roundabout were the remains of nuts and chewed roots, stones of fruit, and such things. I never could understand how it was that, being mad as he certainly was then, he still had the sense, well, rarely it was an instinct, more than any knowledge, to get roots and wild fruits to keep body and soul together. A suggestive subject, truly, said a man who had more millions to his credit than you would expect of a traveller in Machiniland, a man starving within rifle-shot of his friends and supplies, helpless in spite of the resources that civilisation gives him and saved from absolute death by a blessed instinct that we didn't know was ours since the days of the anthropomorphic ape. Hmm, you're right, Barbotin. He couldn't have thought much of the beauties of the night, and if he thought at all he must have placed a grim and literal interpretation on the descent of man with roots with bleeding nail-stripped fingers or climbing for nuts without a tail to steady him. Among us there was a retired navalman, a clean-featured, bronze, shrewd-looking fellow who was a determined listener during these campfire chats. In fact, he seldom made a remark at all. He sat crossed-legged, with one eye closed, a telescope habit, I suppose, watching Barbotin for quite a spell and at last said very slowly and seemingly speaking under compulsion, well, you never know how they take these shocks. We picked a man up once whose two companions had laid dead beside him for days and days. Before he became delirious, the last thing he remembers was getting some carboleic acid from a small medicine-chest. His mates had been dead two days then, and he had not the strength to heave them overboard. I believe he wanted to drink the carbolec. Anyway, he spilt it and went off his head with the smell of the carbolec around him. He recovered while with us. We were on a wary, deep-sea-sounding cruise, but twice during the voyage he had short but violent returns of the delirium and the other condition that he was suffering under when we found him. By the merest accident our doctor discovered that it was the smell of carbolec that had sent him off. Years after this he nearly died of it. He had had fever and they kept disinfecting his room, but luckily for him he became dangerous and violent and they had to remove him to another place. He was all right in a few days. Do you believe that a man could live out a reasonably long lifetime in the way that forty days chap lived? I suppose he could, eh? Sure! Fancy forgetting the civilised uses of tongue and limbs and brain. It seems awful, doesn't it? And yet men have been known to deliberately choose a life of savagery and barbarism, men whose lines have been cast in easy places, too. That's all very well, said Barboton. Now you are speaking of fellows settling down among savages and in the wilds voluntarily and with certain provisions made for emergencies, etc., not of men lost. Even so, a man must deteriorate most horribly under such circumstances. Well, said Barboton, contemplatively. I don't know so much about that. It all depends on the man. Mind you, I do think that the end is always fiasco, tragedy, trouble, ruin. Call it what you like. We can't throw back to barbarism at will. For good or ill we have taken civilisation and the man who quits it pays heavy toll on the road he travels and likely enough fixtures up where he never expected to. The man who wrote for the papers smiled. I know, he said with a kindling eye. I know. It was just such a case you told us of at Churchill's camp the other night. A man of the best calibre and training goes wild and marries two, mark you, two Kepha women, and becomes a Swazi chief. And then the drama of the drama be damned, Grodd Barboton. It was one case out of twenty of the same sort. Barboton was nervously apprehensive of ridicule and hated to be traded and warped out for effects. I was up on the transfer Swazi border in eighty-six, said the millionaire. I remember you told me something of them then. It was a warm corner Swaziland then. Almost the warmest in South Africa you should think, eh? You're right it was. But, said Barboton turning to the correspondent, you were talking of men going a muck through playing white nigger. Well I can tell you this, that two of my best friends have done that same trick, and I'd stake my head that better men or more thorough gentlemen never trod in shoe leather for all their Kepha ways. Do you mean to say, asked the millionaire, settled down among natives, living among them as one of themselves, and still retain the manners, customs, instincts, habits of mind and body, even to the ambitions of a white man? No, well I can't say that. Their ambitions, as far as you could gauge them, were a Kephas. That is, they aspired to own cattle and to hunt successfully, but, and yet I don't know that it is right to say that even, because in almost every case, these men get the hanker for white life again sooner or later. The Kepha ambition may be a temporary one, or it may be that the return to white ways is the passing mania. Who knows anyway? From my own experience of them I can say that the return to their own colour almost invariably means their doom and ruin. I don't know why, but I've noticed it and it seems like like a sort of judgement, if you believe in those things. And you know, he said after taking a few pulls at the pipe again, there's a sense of justice in that too. Civilisation, scorned and flattered, being the instrument of its own revenge. If one could vest the abstract with personal feelings, what an ample revenge would be hers at the sight of the renegade, the hearted, wary and shame-faced, coming back to the ways of his youth and race, and succumbing to some part of that which he had despised and rejected in Toto. Barboton usually became philosophic and reminiscent on these fine nights. Someone would make a remark of pretty general application and he would sit up and wag his old head a few times in silence. Then, from force of habit, he would sit up and knock it out on the heel of his boot, and then art would lounge some reminiscence in illustration of his philosophy. It was generally introduced by a long-drawn thoughtful, well, you know, I've always thought there was something curious about these things. He would have another squint down the empty bowl of the pipe and ask for the tobacco. And then as he lighted up he would say between puffs, I remember in seventy-eight up at Pilgrims, or there was a fellow up Barboton Way in eighty-six. This night he sat in tailor fashion with an elbow socketed in each knee-bend and his hands clasped over the bowl of his pipe. One of the rummiest meetings I ever had, smiling thoughtfully at the recollection, was in the Swazi country in eighty-five. Did I ever tell you about Mahash and the silver spur? He gave a gurgling sort of chuckle and puffed contentedly at the big, bold briar. There were two of us riding through the Swazi country and making for the landing-place on the Maputa side. We had had a row with the Portuguese about some cattle that the niggers stole from us. A couple of the niggers got shot, of course, during the discussion and we had to quit for a while and take a rest on the La Bamba. But that's nix. When we got to the Kamati we were told that there was a white man on the La Bamba whose kafa name was Seboguan. That's the name the niggers gave to a man who wears an eyeglass or spectacles. We were jogging along doing our thirty miles a day living on old melees roasted on a bit of tin and an occasional fowl. Swazi fowl. Two to the meal. Helped on by bowls of Amaz. Thick milk, you know. We used to sleep out in the bush every night with a blanket apiece and saddles for pillows and the horses picketed at our heads. Man, it was grand on nights like this. We were always tired and often hungry but to lie there in the peace and stillness of the bush up at the stars like diamond dust against the sky and not care a dam for anything in God's world why, why I call that living. All those months we had no knowledge of the outer world. As far as we were concerned there might as well have been none. We had one book. The Ingaldsby Legends. If anyone could have seen me reading Ingaldsby by the light of the fire and have heard every now and then the bursts of laughter over the jackdaw of reams or the witch's frolic and others his face would have been a study I expect. However, I was telling you about Mahosh. Mahosh was a big indooner and had about five to seven thousand fighting men. He used to conzer to Umbandine but paid merely nominal tribute and was jolly independent. He was the cleverest looking nigger small, thin and ascetic looking with wonderfully delicate hands clear features and lustrous black eyes. Rarely he gave one the idea that he saw through everything or next to it and though he said very little he looked one of the very determined quiet ones. We had to pass his place to get to Sevilleguans and of course had to stay the day and pay our respects. His crawl was on top of the highest plateau near the Mananga Bluff. And the road, an aggregation of cattle tracks, was very steep and very stony. You can imagine we were not overflushed just then and what puzzled us was what to give the chief as a present when he would accord us an interview. Rifles and ammunition we'd derent part with and we were mortally afraid they were just the things he would want to annex. Finally it occurred to us to present him with one of my chums silver spurs. Heron didn't favour this much and he said it would likely cause trouble but I put that down to his disinclination to spoil his pair of swagger spurs. Only the day before our arrival the chief had purchased a horse. He had sent to Leidenberg for it and it was the first they had ever seen in that part of the country which seems odd when you think that the chief's own name, Mahash, means the horse. However, to proceed we got word the next day that the chief would see us and after the usual hours wait we had our endaba and presented the silver spur. I must say he viewed it very suspiciously, very and when we showed him how to put it on he gave a slow cynical smile and made some remark in an undertone to one of his counsellors. I began to agree with Heron about the unwisdom of giving a present so little understood and would gladly have changed it but that Mahash who was of a practical turn of mind sent a man for our horses and bade us ride with the biting iron on. We gave an exhibition of its uses which pleased him and we too felt quite satisfied for a moment. But things didn't look quite so well when he announced that he was going to ride his horse and he desired Heron to strap the spur onto his bare foot. It was no use hesitating. We had to trust to luck and the chances that a skinny mokh such as his was would take the use of a spur. Besides which Heron, with good presence of mind, jammed the rails on a stone and turned most of the points. It was no good, however. The chief had never been astride a horse before. He was hoisted up by a couple of stalwart warriors. Once on he laid hold of the man with both hands and gripped his heels firmly under the horse's belly. I saw the brute's ears go flat on his neck. The two supporters stepped back. Mahosh swayed to one side and I suppose gave a convulsive grip with the armoured heel. There was a squeal in a scuffle and a black streak shooting through the air with a red blanket floating behind it. The chief once bounced on the stony incline, shot on for another ten feet and fetched up with his head against a rock. I can tell you that for two minutes it was just hell at loose. We dropped our rifles, we always carried them, and ran to the chief. I believe if we had kept them they'd have struck us. For there were scores of black devils round us, flashing asagais in our faces and yelling, PULALIDAN GOS! UMTA GATI! UMTA GATI! They have killed the chief, witchcraft, witchcraft. But in another minute we saw Mahosh standing propped up by several cashlers and holding one hand to his head. He steadied himself for a moment, gave us one steady, inscrutable look, and walked into his private enclosure. For four days we remained there prisoners in fact, though not in name. Nothing was said about leaving but our guns and horses were gone and we were given a hut to ourselves in the centre of the crawl. We didn't know whether Mahosh was dead, dying, or quite unhurt. We didn't know whether we were to be dispatched or set free or to be kept for ever. On the morning of the fifth day we found our horses tied to the cattle-crawl in front of our hut and a grey-headed indooner brought word to us that Sebu Guan, for whom we were looking, lived not far from there along the plateau. We took the hint and saddled up. As we were starting an umphan bought a kid, killed and cleaned and handed it to me, a gift from the chief, and the old indooner stepped up to Hiran with a queer look in his wrinkled, cunning old fizz kid. The chief says, pleasant journey, and sends you this. It was the silver spur. Barbaton had another squint at his pipe and chuckled at the recollection of the old nigger's grim pleasantry. But I was telling you about that white man on the bomber, he resumed. We weren't long in making tracks out of Mahosh's crawl and as we dodged along through the forest path, which just permitted a man on foot to pass, we realized how poor a chance we'd have had had we tried to escape. Every hundred yards or so we had to dismount to get under overhanging boughs or trunks of fallen trees or networks of monkey ropes. The horses had got so used to roughing it that they went like cats, and in several places they had to duck under the heavy timber that hung Port Cullis fashion across the dark little pathway. This was the only way out at the back of Mahosh's. In front of him, of course, were the precipitous sides of the La Bombe range. We went on for hours through the sort of thing, hardly seeing sunlight through the dense foliage. And when we got out at last into a green grassy flat, the bright light and open country fairly dazzled us. Here we met a few women and boys who in reply to our stock question gave the same old reply that we had for days. Oh, feather on ahead! We just swore together like one man for we rarely had reckoned to get to this flying Dutchman this time without further disappointments. We looked around for a place to off-saddle and made for a copy surrounded by trees. Heron was ahead. As we reached the trees he pulled up and with a growing grin called to me, I say, just look here! Here's a rum-start! It was clearly our friend Seboguan. He was standing with arms akimbo and feet well set apart surveying critically the framework of a house he was putting up. He had a towel round his loins and an eyeglass screwed tightly into the near eye, nothing else. We viewed him on profile for quite a while until he turned sharply our way and saw us. It was one of the pleasantest faces in the world that smiled on us then. Seboguan walked briskly towards us saying, Welcome, gentlemen! Welcome! It's not often I see a white face here and, by the by, you'll excuse my attire, won't you? The custom of the country, you know, and in Rome, well... well... you'll off-saddle, of course, and have a snack. Here, Kamala, the run! Hi, you guys, where the devil are they? Here, take these two horses and feed them and now, just walk into my parlor! Nothing ominous in the quotation I assure you. He bustled us around in the jolliest manner possible and kept up a running fire of questions, answers, comments, and explanations while he busied himself with our comfort. It was a round wattle-and-door bat that he showed us into, but not the ordinary sort. This one was as bright and clean as a new pin. Bits of calico and muslin and gay-colored cappellan made curtains, blinds, and table-covers. The tables were of the gin-case pattern, legs planted in the ground, the chairs ordinary bush-stools, but what struck me as so extraordinary was the sight of all the English periodicals and illustrated papers laid out in perfect order and neatness on the table, as one sees them arranged in the reading-room before the first frequentus have disturbed them. There was also a little hanging-shelf on which were five books. I couldn't help smiling at them. The Bible, the Shakespeare, the Navy List, a Dictionary, and Ruff's Guide. They say that you may tell a man by his friends, and most of all by his books, but I couldn't make out much of the slot with one exception. I looked at the chap's easy-bearing, the pleasant hearty manner, and torpedo-beard, and included that the Navy List at any rate was a bit of evidence. However, he kept things going so pleasantly and gaily that one had no time in which to observe much. Lots of little things occurred which were striking and amusing in a way, because of the particular surroundings and conditions of the man's life rather than because of the incidents themselves. For instance, when we owned up that we had had no breakfast, we found ourselves within a few minutes enjoying poached eggs on toast, and I felt myself grinning all over when the Swaziboy waited in possible style with a napkin thrown carelessly over one shoulder. Surely a man must be a bit eccentric to live such a life as this in such a place and alone, and yet take the trouble to school a nigger to wait on him in conventional style. I thought of the peculiar littleness of teaching a nigger-boy that waiters trick, and concluded that our friend, whatever his occupation might be, was not a trader from necessity. After breakfast he produced some excellent cigarettes, another fact in the nature of a paradox. We were making for the landing place on the Timby River, and had intended moving along again that day, but our host was pressing, and we by no means anxious to turn our backs on so pleasant a camp, so we stayed overnight and became good friends right away. I was quite right. He had been in the Navy many years and had given it up to play at exploring. He said he had settled down here because there was absolute peace and a blissful immunity from the ordinary worldly worries. Once a week a native runner bought him his mail-letters and papers, and in fact as he said he was as near to the world as he chose to be, or as far from it. He had a curious gold charm attached to a watch-chain which I saw dangling from a projecting wattle-end in the dining-hut. I was looking at this and puzzling over it. It seemed so unlike anything I had ever seen. He saw me, and after putting us to many a futile guess, told us laughingly that he had found it in one of the villages they had sacked on the West Coast. I don't know what sort of part he took in these nasty little wars, but I'll bet it was no mean one. We listened that night for hours to his easy, bright, entertaining chat, and although he hardly ever mentioned himself for his own doings, one couldn't but see that he had been well in the thick of things and dearly loved to be where the danger was. Now and then he let slip a reference to hardships, escapes, and dangers, but only when such reference was necessary to explain something he was telling us of. What interested us most was his description of General Gordon, Chinese Gordon, with whom he appeared to have been in contact for a good while. The little details he gave us made up an extraordinary vivid picture of the Soldier-Saint, the man who could lead a storming party, a forlorn hope with a Bible in one hand and a cane in the other, the man who, in the infiniteness of his love and tenderness, and in the awful immutability of his decision and justice, realized qualities in a degree which we only associate with a deity. I felt I could see this man helping, feeding with his own short rations, nursing and praying with the lowliest of his men, the incarnation of mercy. But I also saw him facing the semi-mutinous regimen of barbarians and with the awful, passionless decision of fate itself singling out the leaders here and there, in all a dozen men whom he shot dead before their comrades and turning again as calm and as unmoved as ever to repeat his order, the first time was a bed. I pictured this man with the splendid, practical genius to re-conquer and reorganize China, treasuring a cutting which he had taken from what he verily believed to be the identical living tree from which Eve had plucked the forbidden fruit, surely one of the enigmas of history. Do you mean to say that's a fact? Asked the millionaire as old Barbaton paused. As far as I know it certainly is. Our friend told it as a fact and not in ridicule either for he had the deepest reverence and regard for Gordon. He assured us, moreover, that Gordon was once most deeply mortified and offended by a colleague of his treating the matter as a joke and laughing at it. Gordon never forgot that laugh and was always constrained and reserved in the man's presence afterwards. I wish I could remember a hundred for part of our host's anecdotes descriptions of places and of peoples, accounts of travels and adventures. He seemed to know everyone and all places. It was three in the morning before we thought of turning in. After breakfast we saddled up and bade a dew, but our friend walked along part of the way with us to put us on the right path. He was carrying a bunch of white bush-flowers a curious fancy I thought for a man clothed in a towel and an eyeglass. I remarked on the beauty of the mountain-flowers and he held up the bunch. Yes, he said. They are lovely, aren't they? Poor old Terry. He was my man, the only other white man that ever lived here. He was with me for many years and died here two summers back. Fever contracted on the timby. Poor old fellow. I fixed him up on the bluff yonder. He used to gather these flowers and sit there every day of his life looking out towards Dilligoa, so he would ever quit this place and get a sight of old Ireland again. I take him a bunch once in a while. Come up and see where a good friend lies. We left the horses and climbed up the rough path and looked at the unpretentious stone enclosure and the soft slate slab with a rough cut inscription. Paddy Terry's wrist. Are you ready? Aye aye, sir. Our friend leaned over the low stone wall and replaced the faded wreath which was the English one. We left him standing there on the ridge, clear cut above the art line of the mountain and took our way down the rough cattle path that wound down to the still rougher, wilder ploof through which our route lay. I remember so well the way he was standing one foot on the projecting rock, arms folded until we were rounding the turn that took us out of sight. Then he waved adieu. We had unpleasant times on that trip to the timby. We met all the murderous ruffians in that Alsatia and they were all at loggerheads, thieving and shooting with both hands. However, we got out all right after months and months of roaming about owing to the trouble about those cappers and I think we had both forgotten all about Sibogwan by the time we pitched up in Leidenburg again. There was always something happening in that infernal outlaw corner of Swaziland to keep the time from dragging. My chum went off to his farm but I had no home and took the road again with wagons and loaded for barbiton at slashing fine rates. I got there just as the sheba boom was on. Companies were being floated daily. Shares were booming, money flowing freely. All were merry in the sunshine of today. No one took heed of tomorrow. Speculators were making money in heaps. Brokers raking in thousands. You know how it is in a place like that. There was a time when you know how it is in a place like that. After you have been there for a few hours or a day or two you begin to notice that one name is always cropping up oftener than any other. One man seems the most popular, important and indispensable. Well, it was the same here. There was always this one name in everything. Market, mines, sport, entertainment any blessed department. You can just imagine. At least you can't imagine. My surprise when I found that my naked white-capacela friend, Sebo Guam was the man of the hour. I couldn't believe it at first and then a while later it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world for if I ever met a man who looked the living embodiment of mental, moral and physical strength of good humour, grace and frankness, a born king among men, it was this chap. I met him next day and he seemed more full of life and personal magnetism than ever. After that I didn't see him for three or four days. You know how time spins away in a wild, booming market. Then somebody said he was ill down with dysentery and fever at the phoenix. I went off at once to see him. I couldn't believe my eyes. He was emaciated, haggard with black-ringed eyes sunk into his head that he couldn't raise his arm when it slipped from the bed. He spoke to me in whispers and gasps only a word or two and then lay back on the pillars with a terrible look of suffering in his eyes or occasionally dropping the lids with peculiar suddenness and when he did this the room seemed empty from loss of this horrible expression of pain. I stood at the foot of the bed and didn't know what to do or say and didn't know how to get out this sort of thing may only have lasted a few minutes or perhaps half an hour I don't know but after one long spell he opened his eyes suddenly and looked long and steadily into mine sat, bolt upright apparently without effort lifted his glance till I felt he was looking over my head at something on the wall behind me and then raised both arms outstretched as though to receive something and groaning out oh my god my poor wife dropped back dead there were five intent faces upturned at Barberton as he stopped the rosy glow of the fire lighted them up and the man nearest me the millionaire whispered to himself good god how awful well who was he did you began the man who wrote for the papers Barberton looked steadily at him and with measured deliberation said we never knew another word about him from that day to this nothing has ever been heard to throw the least light on him or what he said far away in the stillness of the African night we heard the impatient half grunt half groan of the lion nearby there was a cricket chirping and presently a couple of the logs settled down with a small crunch and a fresh tongue of flame leapt up Barberton pumped a straw up and down the stem of the faithful briar and remarked sententiously yeah it's a rum old world the Savas I've seen civilization take its revenge that way quite a lot of times just like a woman no one else said a word now and then a snore came from under the wagon where the drivers were sleeping the dog beside me gave some abortive whimpers and his feet twitched convulsively no doubt he was hunting in dreamland I felt depressed by Barberton's yarn but round the campfire long silences do not generally follow a yarn however often they precede one one reminiscent suggests another and it takes very very little to tempt another man to recall something which that just reminds me of it was the surveyor who rose to it this time I could see the spirit move him he sat up stroked his clean shaven face closed the telescope eye and looked at Barberton do you know he began thoughtfully you talk of chaps going away because of something happening some quarrel or mistake or offence or something that is all a sort of clap-trap romance I know the mystery trick and so forth but I can face it always interests me although I know it's all rot because of a thing which happened within my own knowledge an affair of a shipmate of mine one of the best fellows that ever stepped the earth in spite of the fact that he was a regular admiral Crichton he was an ideal sort of chap until you got to know him really well and found out that he was cursed with one perfectly miserable tray he never absolutely never forgave an injury a front or cause of quarrel he was not happy or bad tempered a sonnier nature never was created a more patient even tempered chap never lived but it was rarely appalling with what immutable obstinacy he refused to forgive in the instances that came under my own notice where he had quarreled with former friends not through his own fault I must say nothing in this world or any other for that matter could influence him to shake hands or renew acquaintance his generosity and unselfishness were literally boundless his courage and fidelity superb but anyone who had seen evidence of his fault must have felt sorrow and regret for the blemish nature that must have been awestruck and frightened by his relentlessness death all around him the sight of it in friends the prospect of it for himself never shook his cursed obstinacy as we knew after one piece of business he got the VC for a remarkable in fact mad act of courage in rescuing a brother officer the man he carried out fought for fought over and nearly died for was a man to whom he had not spoken for some years God knows what the difference was about this was their first meeting since quitting the same ship and when he carried his former friend out and laid him safely in the surgeon's corner of the square the half-dead man caught his sleeve and called out God bless you old boy all he did was to loosen the other's grip gently and without a word all look at him walk back into the fight it seems incredible it did to us but he wouldn't know him again he'd literally wiped him out of his life this tray was his curse he was well off and well connected and he married one of the most charming women I've ever met for years none of us knew he was married his wife was I am convinced as good as gold but she was young attractive accomplished and in fact a born conqueror perhaps she was foolish to show all the happiness she felt in being liked and admired you know the long absences of a sailor perhaps she would have been wiser had she cut society altogether but she was a true good woman for all that and she worshipped him like a god none of us ever knew what happened but he left wife and child settled on them all he had in the world handed over his estates and almost all his income and his right to legacies to come went out into the world and simply erased them from his mind and life that was a good many years ago ten I should think and I hate to think it but I wish I was as sure of tomorrow as I am sure that he never recognized their existence again the severe shattered at the thought he was a man who could do anything that other men could do he was best at everything he was loved by his mates worshipped by his men and liked and admired by everyone who met him until this tray was revealed others must have felt as I did when I discovered that in him I don't know whether I was more frightened or grieved I don't know that I didn't stick to him more than ever perhaps from pity and the sense that he was his own enemy and needed help I have never heard of or from him since he left the service and yet I believe I was his most intimate friend Oliver Raymond Rivers was his name musical name isn't it? Barberton dropped his pipe Good God Sibyl Guine end of chapter one chapter two of the art span by J. Percy Fitzpatrick the Slibrivox recording is in the public domain read by Sally McConnell chapter two Saltke an incident of the Delagoa Road we were transport riders tricking with loads from Delagoa Bay to Leidenburg tricking slowly through the hot, bushy Lofelt doing our 15 to 20 miles a day the roads were good and the rates were high and we were happy towards sundown two of us strolled on ahead taking the guns in hopes of picking up a guinea-file or a stem-buck or some other small game leaving the wagons to follow as soon as the cattle were in spand we shot nothing in fact we saw nothing to shoot it was wilteringly hot as it always is there until the red sun goes down and all things get a chance to cool it was also very dusty two or three inches of powdery dust under our feet which whipped up in little swirls of the least breath of air I was keeping an eye on the scrub on my side for the chance of a bush pheasant and not taking much notice of the road when my companion pulled up with a half-suppressed exclamation and stood staring hard at something on ahead during my skin he said 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 clocks every day 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 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 he murmured a line from a compatriot green peas has come to market and vegetables is Riz you have come mitovagans you make a detransport 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 Metalla 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 Moody's he said he did make mit one transporter a contract to come by baghoms but it was a woman mit two childs what was leave behind and there was no more wagon so we will walk it was good to walk to make him strong for the 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 chattered with him until our wagons came up when he again politely raised his hat and he said goodbye to us and offered many thanks for the information about the road as we moved on with the wagons he turned to look down the road by which we had come and said apparently as an afterthought you have seen my boy perhaps not no so goodbye yes goodbye it does not take long for daylight to glide through dusk into darkness in the bushfield 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 wagon and talked while the oxen plodded slowly along we had quite a large party that trip for besides Gowan and myself who owned the wagons we had three traders from Swaziland 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 Swaziland 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 Makais 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 advertisement 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 Swaziland country we generally called him the judge as the wagons rumbled along he 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 he answered dryly well I did think of it but first place they ate my wagons Gowan grunted out damn rot and second place continued key placidly considering the kind of cargo you got aboard where it's going to I didn't reckon you wanted any passengers I don't want passengers said Gowan gloomily but any darn fool knows of that fellow never see food or blankets or boy again on the face of God's earth kaffa 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 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 unhospitable or unfeeling but years of roughing it had I suppose dulled our impressions of the first night alone in the felt 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 delicate trays 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 Caffe 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 Delago a 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 turn of deeper grumbling and more surly dissatisfaction than before like as not the silly fool who lose himself looking for water and die in the bush like that one Joe Roberts brought up last season why I remember when Graver the Prophet exclaimed Robby starting up in Mokkalaan 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, sunny skip, and fetch up your German friend for the old man gets underway he dropped off the buck rails as the drivers shattered their arnhors to the cattle to give them a breather kicked his legs loose a bit dusted down his trousers quietly and smiling good-humidly at Gowan guessed it was better a business to hump that grip sack a mile or two than listen to old York's gay's prayers that was his irreverent way of alluding to Gowan's calling of transport rider a York's gay being part of the trek gear Key and I set out together at a brisk pace well knowing how poor was the chance of catching up to the wagons again before the midnight art span 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 one 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 tailor-wise before it making vigorous but futile attempts to whisper side the smoke that would go his way his look of mild curiosity at the sound of our voices wakened up into welcome when he recognized us and he at once became interested in the reason of our return you have 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 cafe bearer he said had left him that morning during the after-breakfast trick ten hours gone by Jimmy muttered the judge and you have waited here since then I asked oh yes yes I read to learn the English it is had any scarf please had any grub anything to eat or a drink explained key illustrating his meaning by graphic touches on math and belt no no I am not hunger also it is good that I eat not it make me use for the prospect he smiled gently and said with a quaint judicial air well I don't know as that's quite necessary but if you can stick it out till that nigger of 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 grab saw and maybe you gave him money as well I have give him one pound to pay the passport which he forgot he say policemen will take him if he shows not the ticket but he will come bring to me the change he is a good boy and he speak in English for good but perhaps something can happen and that policemen have taken him I think even in a newcomer such credulity was a revelation I could not help smiling but the judges clear cut impassive features never changed only at the mention of the boys lingual accomplishments he winked solemnly at me the judge bought matters to a practical issue by telling our friend that he had much better awaited our wagons for the good boy that speaks English so well it ain't said key as if he couldn't find you a cafe can find you almost anywhere if he wants to especially the English speaking ones he added with a twinkle in his eyes he did not wait for any reply but turned the yellow grip sack over and looked at the name Adolf Saltke printed in big white letters your name he asked in chaff rather than that he doubted it my name is Saltke Adolf Saltke come from Germany but in the colony I have us little times took you for an American said the judge without a vestige of a smile I looked hastily at Saltke feeling that his broken halting English should have protected him from such outrageous fooling but my solicitude was misplaced Saltke calmly but firmly disclaimed all knowledge of America and repeated that he was a German key shouldered the portmanteau with the court suggestion well let's get 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 wagons a bullock wagon 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 wagons outspanned in the 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 Garwin was sitting over the fire on a three-legged roughwood 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 Saltke saying boldly how are ya? our friend took the inquiry in a literal sense and was engaged in answering it when Garne cut in with a remark that it was time to be in bed and accepting his own hint he hooked his finger on the rimpy of his camp stool and strode off to where his blankets were already spread under one of the wagons as he turned he pointed with his foot to the fire growling up that there was a billy of tea and some stew warming up for him looking back at Saltke and adding breads in the grub box night he turned in it was just like him to remember these things for in our routine there was a rule no eating during the night outspan it was breakfast after the morning trick and supper before the evening one Garne had also thrown out a couple of blankets and between us we made up pretty well for the lost bedding so Saltke 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 wagons that night was seems a decent sort after all and it would have been a bit rough to leave him to shift for himself Saltke's stupendous greenness should have disarmed Chaff and indeed as 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 Muncharsen of Bushfeld who told how his team of donkeys had been disturbed by a lion during the early morning trick 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 Saltke's struggling with the bewildered bullock at early dawn one morning was one to be remembered however he pledged himself to not carry the experiment further without the assistance of one of us and a day or two later we removed immediate risk by losing his file 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 cognizance 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 Saltke never questioned the 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 a child would have been charming in a well set up act of young man of three and twenty or so it was embarrassing Donald Mackay who was of a choleric disposition complained a day or two after Saltke joined us that why he was blanked if he could blank well stand it why that morning when he was about to give one of the boys a lamp based in the kitty turns white as a girl with the first swear in sight of the shambok and I tell ya Mon I was night a baston with the drawing room blether I was getting off it was quite true Saltke was not shocked nor effecting to be shocked at the vigorous language he heard he was simply unlearned in it and shrank as a girl might from the artburst of violence gradually the feeling of strangeness wore off and the restraint which the new presence had imposed was no longer felt except on odd occasions on our side we chaffed and shook him up partly on the impulse of the time and partly with good-natured intent to make him better fitted to take care of himself among the crowd with whom he would mix later on on his side he had never felt restraint and of course rapidly became familiar with us in our ways and seemed thoroughly to enjoy the chaff and his initiation into the system of good-humoured imposter with all his greenness he was no fool in fact he was in odd unexpected ways remarkably shrewd and quick as he often showed in conversation he was moreover a poor subject for practical jokes and several of the stop kind recoiled on the perpetrators because as I have said he did not know what fear was when a notorious practical joker named Evans with whom we had travelled in company for a couple of days put up the lion scare on Saltke it didn't come off he asked our young friend to dine at his wagons on the other side of a dry donger and after tilling the most thrilling lion yarns all the evening left Saltke to walk back alone while he slipped off to where lay him at the darkest and deepest part of the donger there was the rustle of bushes and sudden roar which had so often played havoc before but Saltke only stepped back and lunged out in unfamiliar fashion with a long revolver which no one knew he carried ignoring the fact that a lion could have half eaten him in the time expended Saltke calmly cocked the weapon and to the terror of his late host poured all six barrels into the bush from which the noise had come he then retreated quietly out of the donger to where we hearing the shots and Evans' shots of terror had run down to see what was up Saltke was excited but quiet and the noise of the reports had evidently prevented him from detecting the man's voice he said it was something what make horror by me and I shoot but I have no more cartridge we did not see Evans again for some months the story of Saltke's lion made the road too hot for him that winter when we told Saltke the real facts his face was a study for some days he was very quiet and thoughtful he was completely puzzled and for the life of him could not imagine the motive that had actuated Evans nor could he on the other hand realise the possibility of anyone acting differently from the way in which he had done before this there had been some horse-play when we were crossing the Kamati River the stream was running strong and was then from four to five feet deep at the drift and although it was known to be full of crocodiles there was little or no danger at the regular crossing however Key had primed Saltke with some gorgeous stories of her breath escapes intending to play a trick on him in the river it's quite a common thing for men to be carried off here said the judge but white men are very seldom killed not more than four or five a year because of the boots boots exclaimed Saltke inquisitively yes said Key in half absent tones if you kick properly nor cruck can stand it Saltke complained excitedly as though he had suffered gross injustice that no one had told him this interesting phase of life on the road but Key snubbed him telling him that men didn't speak much of such matters as it gave the impression of bragging Saltke who was above all things desirous of conforming with etiquette of the road asked no more questions but Key later on in the day affecting to relent a little got Saltke to sit straddled legs on the pole of one of the wagons and there under his directions practiced kicking crocodiles the crossing was too difficult for one span of oxen so we double spanned and put all hands on with whips and shambox along the 30 oxen to whack and shout until we got through Key placed himself behind Saltke and just when the excitement was greatest with his long whip stick and lash he made a loop in which he managed to enclose Saltke's legs one jerk took him clean off his feet and downstream he went floundering and kicking for dear life for he believed a crocodile had him his kicking when he was head downwards and his legs were free of the water was remarkable there were rows of laughter from everyone as Key passed the word along but presently there was a lull and the niggers stopped laughing and felt the joke fall flat when Saltke utterly unconscious of the real cause of his upset waded deliberately back as soon as he had recovered his feet and pale but undaunted took his place shambox in hand the same as before among transport riders the condition of the Berg as the spurs of the long Drakensburg range of mountains are called Quillock really is always a fruitful topic of conversation the Berg at Spitzkopp is worse than at any other point I believe and Saltke exhibited a growing interest in this much discussed feature of the road his enthusiastic nature led him here into all sorts of speculations about it which were highly amusing to us and the judge egged poor Saltke on and crammed him so that he undertook in our interest to devise some method for ascending this awful Berg whereby the then terrible risks to life and property would be minimized if not entirely removed the position as Key explained it was this there was a long steep hill to be surmounted the grade of which varied between 30 degrees and vertical but the crowning difficulty lay in the chute here it was an open question whether the hill did not actually overhang so steep was it in fact that it was not an uncommon occurrence for the front oxen to slip as they gain the summit and fall back into the wagon possibly killing both leader and driver and doing infinite damage to the loads Saltke faced this problem brimful of confidence in the subject and himself after hours of keen discussion and diligent experiments Saltke produced his plan it was a system of endless rope on guides and pulleys so arranged that by a top anchorage on the summit of this hill both oxen and driver would be secure Saltke was triumphant but Key extricated himself temporarily by pointing out that as we had not enough rope to try the scheme we would have to take the old roundabout road and leave the chute for the next trip the joking with Saltke as I have said at times degenerated into common horseplay and this led to the only unpleasantness we had the younger Makai Robbie was a quiet humorous and most gentle natured fellow an immense favourite with everybody one night we were all standing round the fire when something occurred which nobody ever seemed able to explain Saltke had mislead his pipe and thinking he had seen Robbie take it asked him for it back Robbie denied all knowledge and Saltke deeming it but another practical joke said I saw you taking a duel using a term which he poor chap had picked up without knowing the meaning a term which among white men never passes unnoticed Robbie's scotch blood was a flame and before one of us could stir before he himself could think of the allowances to be made before the word was well said a heavy right-hander across the mouth dropped Saltke back against the wagon blank amazement and something like consternation marked every face but none was so utterly taken aback as poor Saltke who would have suffered anything rather than inflict pain upon a fellow being he only said Robbie what have I say I do not understand and looking white and miserable walked quietly off to his blankets and turned in to us it was though a girl a child had been struck and no one felt this more than Robbie himself as soon as he saw that the insult was not intentional the look on Saltke's face was that of a stricken woman a look of dull unmerited pain he was not cowed just dazed and hurt but inexpressibly hurt you will see men blink and shuffle under that look on a woman's face you will see a master quail before it in a servant you will see white go down before it in black for it is God's own weapon in the hands of helpless right as long as I live I shall remember that look I felt as though I had done it we tricked as usual next morning at about three o'clock and it must have been some time in the dark hours of the early trick that Robbie spoke to Saltke whatever it was he said it relieved the awkwardness and restored Saltke to something of his old self but he was never quite the same again and for some days we did not get over the look in his eyes and the feeling of guiltiness it left in us Robbie did not speak of that early morning scene but later in the day remarked incontinently by God he is white is Saltke white all through Saltke kept a diary and kept it with the most marvellous fidelity and unflagging industry and he also learned to shoot and shot cocky ollie birds occasionally and was pleased to know their sporting and scientific names there is a sort of bastard cockatoo in those parts which is commonly known as the go away bird on account of its cry which closely resembles these words and of a habit it is supposed to have of warning game of the approach of man in Saltke's diary there should be an elaborate essay on the ancestry and personal habits of this bird and the wonderful traditions of its family he took these things down faithfully and laboriously from the judge's own lips the judge had a copious mythology poor Saltke tried to stuff some of his dicky birds labelling them with such names as key could always supply at a moment's notice the result was unpleasant as Saltke took to bestowing these ill preserved relics in the side pockets of the tents in the wagon boxes and in a dozen other unlikely spots it was only now and then that we could actually find them but there was a constant suggestion of their proximity nevertheless we took to calling Saltke the professor as it was a title which we told him seemed better to suggest an all round efficiency than any other we could think of and therefore suited him more than such purely departmental distinctions as leather stocking, the engineer or the ornithologist I had forgotten to say there was one thing on which we did not chaff poor Saltke he played the zither I do not know if he played it well or not for he was the only one whom I have heard play that instrument to us lying round a bright thorn wood fire in which the big logs burnt into solid glowing coals to us who lay back smoking or gazing up into the infinite depths of silent cloudless sky watching millions and millions of stars twinkling busily and noiselessly down at us the music was a kind of dream as Saltke sat in the glow of the fire and the unsteady flicker of shooting and dying flames through lights and shadows on his face it sometimes looked as though he was not quite what we took him for his was a bright intelligent face lit up by quick eager blue eyes in fact though it was a thing that we took no stock in Saltke was really a very good looking boy and one naturally thought of him as some mother's hope and pride and the look of worry and grief that I sometimes fancied I saw was put down to homesickness brought out by music however good or bad his music was he seemed to feel it and we well we never talked much after he began to play and when he stopped we generally knocked our pipes out with a sort of a half sigh and turned in for the night it used to make me think of home as I remembered it when I was still externally respectable before I took to flannel shirts and mole skins and ways that were not home ways and I expect the others felt that too we had passed the crocodile river and the belt of tsetse fly country we had passed Josie Koulou's where Hart was murdered by the niggers and we told Saltke the story of the dead man sentry go we passed ship mountain and pointed out the bush that hid the haunted cave and told him the weird tradition of the old witch doctor imprisoned by the rock slide handling still as a skeleton the implements of magic he used in life all these things were noted in Saltke's voluminous diary and a curious medley it must have contained with the embroidered facings of key and the solid square facts of Garwin intermingled with the author's own original remarks and reflections Saltke, to do him justice, was clearly a person of some purpose he had placed before himself an ideal and he never lost sight of it he was eternally qualifying for that pursuit which he called deprospect he would eat from choice the charred and blackened crust of an overbaked loaf for a steak that had slipped the gridiron and got well sanded he also seemed to prefer the dregs of the coffee-billy which he swallowed black and unsweetened he scorned to use a fork and he always slept on the lumpiest ground and all this was to fit him for the hardships and emergencies he promised himself as a full-blown prospector his eagerness for knowledge of the flora and fauna was equally remarkable he had compiled a sort of dictionary of plants and animals describing their virtues, medicinal or culinary and I am sure that towards the end of our trip Saltke would have set out into the bush with a light heart armed only with his book and fortified by a confidence which was absolutely phenomenal looking back on it all it seems a mean shame ever to have played on his credulity and indeed most of us were even at this time keenly alive to this but there were times when his eager questioning and intense earnestness about commonplace trifles made temptation irresistible and seemed even to inspire one with ridiculous notions suited to Saltke's undiscriminating appetite it was on a Sunday morning that we came inside of Pretoria's corp a solitary sugarloaf hill and we lay by as usual during the hours of daylight we knew it was Sunday because Saltke had said so and because we saw him in the early morning kneeling in the shadow of a big tree a few yards from the wagon's prayer book in hand absorbedly following the prayers of the mass he was a Roman Catholic and was as uncompromisingly particular in observing the smallest detail of his church's ritual and teaching as he was by nature tolerant of the shortcomings of others in the course of the morning's short excursion Saltke had come across one of those crawling creatures known to children as Thousand Legs the common harmless millipede it was the first he had ever seen and words failed him in his quest for information Key was the first he met on his return and the judge told him solemnly that the insect in question was that well-known and most ferocious of reptiles the Viper during breakfast Saltke absorbed whole volumes of information about this Viper its habits and uses and as soon as the meal was over he betook himself to the side pocket of the tent wagon where the beloved diary was kept and commenced to write up the new discovery we were all spread about enjoying the morning smoke or taking it easy in other ways we had forgotten Saltke but presently his face popped up wearing a most worried earnest and intense expression George he called George half us dot Viper Spell Key dictated calmly W.H.Y.P.E.R. wiper and Saltke with infinite pains put it down but we heard him a moment later from his place in the tent of the wagon murmuring Libar Himmel taught Fawcett an ugly name he kept his diary in English and many a perspiring hour did he spend in his struggles with our language but he never quailed once never even slackened for he said it was good to make him friends with her English and he can talk him when he shall come on to prospect Saltke could hardly have taken down the name of this new wonder when the sight of a blue jay flying past one marvellous blaze of gorgeous color as its shiny feathers caught the sunlight sent him into a perfect paroxysm of excitement he had seen the honey-suckers and knew them in the diary as birds of paradise he knew the ordinary or cocky olive-bird as the small pheasant of Capricorn he had shot Dicky-birds by the dozen and stuffed them and their noxious odours seemed to add zest to his ornithological pursuits but he had never seen, never dreamed of anything like this for one spell-bound moment Saltke watched the bird sail by and then gasped out caught in him will fought for his debt Christ, not be still, and I shot him diary, pen, ink and blotter were thrust aside and Saltke scrambled for the gun we turned our backs on him to watch the bird Saltke jumped from the wagon though a port of the two barrels was so loud and close that it made us duck but the blue jay sat unmoved there was a curious silence that made several of us look round together the gun had fallen and Saltke was standing above it, rigid and ghastly white with one hand gripping a burnt and blood-spattered tear in his right leg as we sprang to him, open-armed, he seemed just to sway gently towards us with closed eyes and a soft murmur of words in his own tongue it sounded like a prayer I think he fainted then, but we were never sure, as he was always so still with it all that one couldn't tell at times whether he was dead or alive the medicines we had and the remedies we knew did not run to gunshot wounds and broken legs but we made shift to fix him up somehow with a rough ligament it was here that Key came in, quiet and self-possessed, firm and kind he cut away the burnt torn clothing he washed out the ragged, blackened wound he tied the leg and told us it was fractured, shattered and would have to come off and Saltke lay there under the big tree on a blanket spread on a heap of grass as white as alabaster and as still while we watched silently beside him, fanning him with small green boughs and keeping off the flies Donald McKay had started off at once for a doctor but we knew that with the best luck in finding him and riding day and night it must be over two days before we could get him down there Robbie went with his brother to the nearest wagons a few miles on ahead where Donald raised a horse and went on a learn on his long ride for help Robbie came back with a few things that we hoped would help a little and then we settled down to watch in silence the awful race between ebbing life and coming help through the hot, long, quiet day we watched and tended him and so on into the cool of the evening we could do nothing really but it seemed to please him and us to whisk away the flies and say a word of cheer to him or now and then to shift the cotton sheet that covered him when the stars came out and the soft cool feel of night grew up around and the ruddy flicker of the fire worked its magic on the encampment changing and beautifying everything with sudden lights and weird shadows when the cattle were tied up to the yurks and one by one lay down to sleep with great restful deep drawn sighs when there were no sounds but the steady chewing of the cud and the occasional distant howl of the hyena or the sharp, unreal laugh of the jackal then did we rarely seem to settle down to the business of waiting now and then, perhaps three or four times in the night, Sultka asked for water once or twice towards morning he sighed as a pressed, tired sigh but not a word of complaint not a sign of impatience not one evidence of the torture he was enduring escaped him when morning came cool and fragrant and the blue smoke of the campfire curled up straight and clean into the pure air he was as quiet and uncomplaining still though not for one second had his eyes closed nor the deadly numbing pain ceased its ache Sultka seemed to me to look younger than ever though terribly white and fagged his eyes looked blue and brave and trustful childishly trustful as ever and he alone of all the party did not keep looking towards the west for the return of Donald Mackay and his charge all that day we watched and waited and on through another slow and silent night but we could see then that Sultka could not last out much longer without a doctor's help and that his chance was becoming a poor one it must have been about three in the morning when lying flat on my back looking up into the wonderful maze of stars that spatters our southern sky I heard or felt the tiniest tap tap tap under my head I shot up with the cry of there's Donald at last we were all up and listening but could hear nothing when standing of course however there was no mistake and after five minutes we could hear on the cool clear still air the footfall of a horse one horse as we all remarked with an awful heart-sinking two of us, Key and I, went on to meet the horseman and in a few minutes came upon Donald leading a horse upon which by the aid of a propping arm was balanced a man whom we all knew only too well in a breath Donald told us that he had sent on from the first camp for the district surgeon but chanceing on Doc Monroe had packed him on the horse and come back with him as a makeshift Monroe was a quack chemist of morose and brutal character and had drunkard with it his moral status might be gauged by the fact that no patient among those who knew him personally or by repute ever approached him professionally except upon the contract system so much the job, payment on delivery, cured he had a certain repute for ability God knows how it was earned for he had killed more men than any other agency in the country but I believe that his brutal and sardonic indifference to public opinion his fiendish hints that there was no accident about the deaths of his patients and that those who want Doc Monroe can pay for him by God inspired a weird dread which irrationally perhaps yet not unnaturally but got a sort of blind, awed belief in the man's ability men hardly stricken have been known to sit on the bar step and wait while Doc having drunk himself drunk would drink himself sober and then with implicit faith swallow down mixtures to which the bloodshot eyes and the trembling hands of the Doc added the interest of a blind gamble by the uncertain light of the stars I had not recognized him until Key who was a few paces in front said softly it's Doc Monroe, dead drunk Donald was utterly worn out and wild with despair Doc had been drunk when he found him but as Donald said he was always that and he had hoped that a 40 mile ride would sober him however it seems that twice on the road he had got liquor and the second time when Donald had caught him and taken it away he had sat down by the roadside stolid and immovable until the liquor was returned to him there were reasons why we bottled up our rage and treated the Doc with a show of civility and even conciliatory respect we knew firstly that he had his instruments and that only he could use them and secondly that however drunk he might be he never lost his senses until delirium set in and moreover that he was intensely suspicious of offence when in the state and if once huffed was indifferent to prayers and threats alike the look on Gaon's face was positively murderous when he saw in what manner our waiting was rewarded I am sure he would riddly have killed Monroe at that moment poor Sotka showed his first signs of anxiety then and we had to make what excuses we could the want of light first of all and then the long ride to account for the doctors not seeing him now that he had come but the hours went by the chance was ebbing away and we could do nothing absolutely nothing with the man we tried him with everything we gave him black coffee he wouldn't touch it we tried soup he kicked it over food sleep a bath everything was rejected with a sullen and stolid shake of the head and the one word that we would not give for four mortal hours the man lay sullenly by the wagon on a pile of blankets and only the one word passed his lips we did not give him more it would have destroyed our only chance and without liquor he would not budge Day was well advanced when Monroe stood up quietly and walked over to where Gaon stood beside his wagon I suspected that the doc had noticed Gaon's look when he came into camp with us and now it was clear that he had you think I'm drunk said Monroe with a malignant sneer I saw you look at me when I got off that darned horse you think I'm drunk do you Gaon looked him steadily in the eyes but made no answer and doc resumed are you going to give me that whiskey again no answer but I walked nearer as I could see Gaon's hands close and go back and his chest came up with hard breathing are you going to give me that whiskey asked Monroe again slowly and deliberately no ruled Gaon with a tiger-like spring at the other man I'll see you in hell first I caught Gaon's uplifted arm but Monroe never flinched and pulling himself together with something of a shake he said in a perfectly sober even tone and with diabolical malevolence then I'll see your friend dead and rotten before I stare at hand to help him and with that he marched back to the blankets and lay down again an hour passed and he never stirred a finger never even blinked his staring eyes then the macaque's key and I held a council and decided to give him the liquor as a last a truly forlorn hope it was left to me to see him and I went over bottle and glass in hand he wouldn't touch it he would begged and prayed but it had no effect whatever he just lay there resting on one arm with the cruel shallow glitter in his eyes that one sees in those of wild beasts I returned to the others and we had another talk and then I offered him money a price all that we could give that fetched him he sat up and looked at me for about a minute and then said shaking with eight your liquor I won't touch your money won't buy me as soon as it's cool enough to move I go back and if you've ever heard of Doc Monroe you'll take that for a last answer that was a facer and when I went back and told the others opinions were divided as to what to do Garn and Key were for the rifle cure if he wouldn't operate shoot him but we urged another a last delay say till noon and they gave way but warned us it would be useless the heat that day was awful no breeze no relief only dead oppressive heat reflected to and fro the steel blue sky and the hard baked earth the fires were out we had cooked nothing that day and the camp looked dead and deserted one or more of us would always be with Soltka the others would be lying in the shadow of a tree or under a wagon we had some faint hope that the district surgeon would turn up but not before the morrow and knowing Soltka's condition that seemed useless so our only real chance was with Monroe as we lay there dismal and hopelessly waiting we were suddenly startled by a most peculiar and unnatural bark the two dogs also jumped up and ran out onto the road we could see nothing except that Monroe had gone the noise was repeated and the dogs growled and every hair stood up on their backs great God! look here! came from Donald following his glance we saw low down amongst the thick buffalo-gross the wild haggard face of Doc Monroe his shock-red hair half covered his eyes which glittered and glared like a lioness's as we stood he barked again and made a jump out to the margin of the gross he was mad, stark, staring mad with delirium tremens in one of his hands, half hidden by the gross we could see a bushman's friend and the bright blade seemed to catch an ugly gleam from the man's eyes and reflected malevolently back on us Monroe was a big man and although ruined in health by years of hard drinking would have been a very ugly customer while the mad fit-blasted so we just stood our ground ready to take him any way he wanted to come after a minute or two he seemed to feel the effect of four pairs of eyes looking steadily at him and the wild beast died out and his body which had been as rigid as a standing pointer's became visibly limp and nervous he got up heavily with a silly hysterical laugh and stood meekly before us looking as foolish and harmless as a human being might he sidled over towards Donald McKay keeping as far as possible from Gowan whom he clearly distrusted and looked furtively around as though others besides us might hear him instead with a sickly smile and in a thin, uncertain voice I was playing Donald Old Man only playing you know me old Doc Monroe you weren't frightened Donald hey hey hey I like to bark you know I like it and who'll stop me if I like it hey you could see I was playing old partner you knew it didn't you the man was wretchedly weak and shaky and as he continued to look about anxiously he wiped the drops of cold perspiration of his colourless face with the dirty strip of Capilane which did service for a pocket handkerchief he sided up closer and closer to Donald and watched with growing intentness and terror the place from which he had just emerged McKay quietly imprisoned the knife-hand but Monroe never noticed that and only clung closer to him and began to mutter and cry out again with excitement and terror which grew on him until he shrieked to Donald to save him and to knife him over there pointing to the tree beneath which he had hidden Key took the preferred knife and walking quietly towards the tree began to hack it in an unenthusiastic manner and the relief that this seemed to give Monroe would have been ludicrous but for the desperate hopelessness it brought for poor old Sotka it was no longer possible to keep up our well-intended fiction about the doctor requiring rest for Monroe's maniac laughter and shrieks of terror became so frequent and awful that they must have startled one half a mile away he became so violent that we were obliged to take him down to the sprit and to tie him down there in the shadow of a high bank with one of the niggers to look after him and an occasional visit from one of us to see if all was well Sotka bore the news as he had borne all that went before with silent, martyr-like patience he seemed to have guessed it not a muscle moved not a feature changed he listened to it as calmly as he listened to our expressed hope that the district surgeon would turn up by sundown and with his little personal concern towards evening he spoke a good deal to us all but in a way that made our hearts sink he spoke of his home and his past life for the first time and of something that was troubling him greatly he also admitted that his leg was feeling very hot and that he felt twinges of pain shooting up into the groin and body at sundown he asked for his prayer-book and later on when we had left him alone for a while and sat in silent, helpless to spare by the neglected fire he asked for Robbie at last, at about ten o'clock that night we heard the welcome sound of a horse's trotting and to our unspeakable delight the cherry little doctor turned up poor old Sotka did brighten up then and the smile which had never failed him throughout the days of suffering seemed to me more easy and hopeful in less than an hour the shattered leg was off in spite of the bad light and the rude appliances all went well and with infinite relief we saw Sotka doze off under the merciful influence of the morphia which the doctor had brought we felt that we had rounded the turn and could afford to sleep easy the little doctor who had ridden seventy miles from Sunnap rolled into his blankets near where Sotka slept and was in the land of dreams long before we who were restless from very relief and joy settled down to close our eyes I seemed to have dozed for but a few minutes when in my dreams as it seemed to me I heard in the faintest but clearest whisper the doctor saying mortification you know I couldn't see it by candlelight or we might have spared him the operation he was just dead he sighed himself out as the doctor said like a tired child to sleep we buried him close to the road under the big thorn tree which we stripped of its bark for a couple of feet to serve for a headstone for his grave it was the tree where we had seen him on his knees of prayer and as it neared Sundan we called for the oxen and in spanned for the evening trek the doctor had gone he had to get back those seventy miles to see another patient whose life perhaps depended on the grit of his gallant little horse during the night Monroe had managed to get loose and with a madman's cunning had got away with his horse and disappeared which was perhaps a good thing for him the boys had packed everything on the wagons and were lashing the bedding in the tent wagon so as to be out of the way of the dust and the thorns when one of them picked up and handed out to us the open book and writing materials just as Salka had left them three days before when he had jumped out to shoot the blue jay the diary lay open at the last written page and we read their most veruscious of reptile Easter viper Robbie closed the book gently and put it away it didn't seem the least bit funny then at midnight when the long trek was over and we were rolled in our blankets near the campfire Robbie's heart was full he spoke slowly and in half broken tones you mind the time he sent for me? you do? yes well it was to ask my forgiveness for what he said the day I struck him I, he did that Robbie looked slowly round the circle through dimmed glasses and then went on hesitatingly and he said too that we had all been too good to him and that he played it low on us and that he, he hoped the good god would pardon him the greatest crime of all and he said that I must give his prayer book and his zither Robbie continued in a low and reverent tone to, to his child, his little boy Salka's child came from all together Robbie nodded it was a space of time when everyone shifted a little and felt chilled but it was Gaon who put our common thought into words where is his wife? he asked slowly dad said Robbie I, I didn't know he was married Robbie's look was a prayer for mercy as he answered he wasn't End of chapter 2