Chapter Nineteen.
Warren’s Opportunity.
The Kunaga river was “down”; which is to say that the heavy rains of the last three days, especially among the foot-hills wherein it took its source, had converted it into a red, rolling, turbid torrent, of inconceivable swiftness and power. A comparative trickle at ordinary times, now the great raging flood surged within a few feet of overlapping its ample bed, submerging the lower of the trees fringing its banks well-nigh to their tops. A grand spectacle those seething red waves, hissing and rearing as they encountered some obstacle, then the crash as this gave way, and the mighty current, unchecked, poured onward with a savage roar. Great tree-trunks rolled over and over in the flood, and now and then, bodies of drowned animals, sheep, cattle, horses, swept helplessly down.
“Someone’s the poorer for the loss of his whole span,” remarked Warren, as a number of drowned oxen were whirled by. “Likely the river first came down in a wall—it does sometimes—and caught the whole lot bang in the middle of a drift.”
“Most likely,” assented Lalanté. “But I’ve never seen the river as full as this. Isn’t it grand?”
The two were standing on a high, scaur-like bank where the Kunaga swept round one side of Le Sage’s farm, and just below the krantz above which its owner and Wyvern had held their somewhat inharmonious discussion. They had strolled down to look at the river. The two youngsters had accompanied them, but now had wandered away on their own account.
The rain had ceased but the sky was veiled in an opaque curtain; the high rand beyond the Kunaga river valley being completely hidden by a grey and lowering murk. The unwonted gloom seemed to add to the terror of the forces of the bellowing flood. The scene on the whole was dreary and depressing to the last degree. Yet no depression did it convey to the hearts of the dwellers on this veldt, for after it the land would smile forth a rich and tender green, and flocks and herds grow fat, and game be plentiful—and, not least, it meant an ample storage of water in dams and tanks against months, it might be, wherein not another drop should fall.
Warren had taken to coming over to Le Sage’s of late, and would generally stay the night there, or even two. From Lalanté he would meet with a frank and cordial welcome. She liked him for his own sake—and in addition was he not a friend of the absent one; upon whom and upon whose good qualities he had the tact to lose no opportunity of dwelling.
“I can’t, for the life of me, get at the secret of poor old Wyvern’s ill-luck,” he would say, for instance. “He’s one of the finest fellows I’ve ever known, and yet—he can’t get on. I own it stumps me.”