“Sleep. In the blessed veldt. I called in at your place, but as far as I could make out your nigger said you’d gone to Helpmakaar. So I thought I’d go down to the river bank and try that place you pointed out to us for a buck, then call back later and have a shakedown with you when you come back.”
Here Kendrew interrupted us by bellowing to his boy to put on a great deal of beefsteak to fry, and to hurry up with it. “After a night in the veldt you’ll be ready for breakfast, I should think,” he explained heartily.
While we were at breakfast Falkner gave us a further outline of his doings. A mist had come up along the river bank, and in the result he had completely lost his bearings. Instead of taking his way back to my place he had wandered on in the opposite direction, tiring his horse and exasperating himself, as every high ridge surmounted only revealed a further one with a deep, rugged, bushy valley intervening. At last his horse had refused to go any further, and he had to make up his mind to lie by in the veldt and wait till morning.
“The rum part of it was,” he went on, “I couldn’t have been very far from here—and you’d think a horse would have known by instinct there was a stable in front of him. Well, I, for one, am choked off belief in the marvellous instinct of horses, and all that sort of rot. This brute wasn’t tired either—he simply and flatly refused to go on.”
“Where was that?” I said, now roused to considerable interest. “At least, I mean—was it far from here?”
“No. I just said it wasn’t,” he answered, a little testily. “It was just where the path dives through a pile of red rocks—you would know it, Glanton. It’s like a sort of natural gateway. Well nothing on earth would induce that silly beast to go through there, and, d’you know, upon my soul I began to feel a bit creepy—remembering how the niggers have likely got a sort of grudge against me. So I thought after all, I’d better stay where I was and wait till morning—and—here I am.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been anybody laying for you, Sewin. You may make your mind easy on that point,” I said. “Possibly though, there may have been a snake, a big mamba perhaps, lying in the path just at that point—and your horse knew it. That’d be sufficient to hold him back.”
“By Jove! I shouldn’t wonder,” he said. “Wish I could have glimpsed him though. A full charge of treble A would have rid this country of one snake at any rate.”
Falkner’s experience had so exactly corresponded with my own as to impress me. While I had been held up in this eerie and mysterious manner on one side of the pile of rocks, the same thing had happened to him on the other, and, so far as I could make out, at just about the same time. Well, we would see if anything of the sort should befall us presently when we passed the spot in the broad light of day. The while the two late combatants had been discussing the disappearance of Hensley.
“Rum thing to happen,” commented Falkner. “Ain’t you rather—well, uncomfortable, at times, here, all alone?”