“Busy, I see!” said Suffield, having shaken hands, and looking rather awkward, for what with Mona worrying his life out for the last half hour, and what with the confounded cheek, as he reckoned it, of suggesting that Musgrave should knock off work and come along, he felt himself in that figurative but highly graphic predicament known as between the devil and the deep sea. But the eyes of the most good-natured man in the world read and interpreted his look.
“Going to take him away with you, Suffield?” he said.
“Well—um—ah—”
“Off you go, Musgrave; I expect Miss Ridsdale will comb your hair for you for keeping her waiting, and it’s nearly five. And I say, Suffield,” he called out after them when they were leaving; “don’t let him try to tumble over any more cliffs, eh! So long!” and chuckling heartily, the genial official turned back to light a fresh pipe and do another hoar of his own work, and that of his assistant too.
Ambling along the dusty waggon road which led up to the grassy nek about a mile from the township, preparatory to striking off into the open veldt beyond, the trio were in good spirits enough.
“Well, and why haven’t you blown me up for keeping you waiting?” said Roden.
“Do I ever blow you up? Besides, you couldn’t help it,” answered Mona.
“Ah, ‘To err is human’ says the classic bard. He might have added, ‘to blow a man up for what he can’t help is feminine.’”
“Don’t be cynical now, and sarcastic. And it’s our last day.”
“Why, hang it, the chap isn’t going to be away for a year,” cut in Suffield, who was at that moment struggling with a villainously manufactured lucifer match, which gave him rather the feeling of smoking sulphur instead of tobacco. And then there was a clatter of hoofs behind, and they were joined by a couple of Boers of the ordinary type, sunburned and not too clean of visage—one clad in “store-clothes” the other in corduroy, and both wearing extremely greasy and battered slouch hats. These, ranging their wiry, knock-kneed nags alongside, went through the usual ceremony of handshaking all round, and thereafter the swapping of pipe-fills with the male element in the party.