We had dinner in the open, under the waggon sail which I had rigged up as shelter from the sun, and which now did duty to give shelter from the dew.
“I’m afraid it’s all game fare to-night, Mrs Sewin,” I said. “This is roast bush-buck haunch, and that unsightly looking pot there beside the Major contains a regular up-country game stew. I rather pride myself on it, and it holds five different kinds of birds, besides bacon, and odd notions in the way of pepper, etc.”
“And that’s what you call roughing it,” was the answer. “Why, it looks simply delicious.”
“By Jove, Glanton, we must get the recipe from you,” said the Major when he had sampled it. “I never ate anything so good in my life.”
Tom and another boy in the background, were deft when help was required, and I know that if anybody ever enjoyed their dinner my guests did on that occasion. And upon my word they might well have done so, for trust an old up-country man for knowing how to make the best of the products of the veldt; and the best is very good indeed. And as we partook of this, by the light of a couple of waggon lanterns, slung from the poles of our improvised tent, the surroundings were in keeping. On the open side lay a panorama rapidly growing more and more dim as the stars began to twinkle forth, a sweep of darkening country of something like fifty or sixty miles, reaching away in the far distance beyond the Blood River, on the left, and immediately in front, beyond the Tugela, the wooded river bank and open plains and rocky hills of Zululand. Then, suffusing the far horizon like the glow of some mighty grass fire, the great disc of a broad full moon soared redly upward, putting out the stars.
“Now this is what I call uncommonly jolly,” pronounced the Major, leaning back in his chair, and blowing out the first puffs of his after dinner pipe.
“Hear—hear!” sung out Falkner. And then, warmed up into a glow of generosity by a good dinner and plenty of grog, I’m blest if the fellow didn’t trot out quite a yarn about the cow chevying him and my timely assegai throw; whereupon there was a disposition to make a hero of me on the spot.
“Pooh! The thing was nothing at all,” I objected. “An everyday affair, if you’re working with unbroken cattle.”
Yet there was one face which expressed more than the others, expressed in fact unbounded approval, as it was turned full on me with that straight frank gaze, and I exulted inwardly, but then came a thought that dashed everything and was as a judgment upon my quite unwarrantable conceit. This was it. What if they are engaged, and that full, frank look of approval is one of gratitude that I should have saved—if not the life of the other—at any rate the certainty of him being badly injured? It is singular that no such idea had ever occurred to me before, but it did now, and seemed to lend significance to certain signs of resentment and ill-will which I had noticed on Falkner’s part on occasions where his cousin was concerned. And the thought was a thoroughly disquieting one, I admit.
“Listen! Here they come,” I said, holding up a hand. “The entertainment is about to begin.”