“No, I don’t. They’d have killed you as sure as eggs,” was the decisive reply. “They’re a mighty schelm lot up Kameel Kloof way, and there has been more than one disappearance of white men during the last few years. But you can’t bring them to book. They swarm like red ants in that location, and no Kafir will ever give another away.”
In point of fact I was not ill-pleased with this decision, simply and solely because the peril I had come through would enhance my interest in the eyes of Beryl, especially as it had been incurred in her particular service.
Our return had been effected without incident or opposition, and to me there was a strong smack of the old border raiding kind of business as we brought back the recovered spoil, recovered by our own promptitude and dash. As for myself, I had undergone some experience of the noble savage in his own haunts, and began to feel quite a seasoned frontiersman. And yet barely three months ago I had been worrying along in the most approved mill-horse round in a City office. Heavens! what a change had come into my life.
Immediately on our return, all concerned in it had held a council of war, confined rigidly to the four of us. The fewer in the know the better, Brian had declared, wherefore he had not disclosed the whole facts of the case even to his father. One of the thieves had been shot, whether killed or disabled of course we had no idea. On that we must keep our own counsel, absolutely and strictly, and to make assurance doubly sure we must never so much as mention the matter again even among ourselves.
Incidentally the rest of us thought it just as well that Trask had accounted for him, because Trask was the weak link in the chain, whereas now that he was the one most concerned, self-preservation alone would keep him from giving away the affair under an impulse of senseless brag.
“You see,” pronounced Brian, “as long as we keep dark the Kafirs’ll keep dark, too. They’ll think nothing of one fellow getting hurt, because it’s quite in accordance with their laws and customs that some one should get hurt in a little affair of the kind. But if we start stirring up things—setting the police on to the track, and so forth—why then it’s likely the other business will crop up, and that’ll be more than awkward, for the schelm wasn’t even going for us, but running away. Running away, mind. There’s no doubt about it but that we—or rather, Holt—struck upon a regular nest of cattle-thieves; but we can do nothing further under the circumstances, nothing whatever. So mum’s the word, absolutely. Is that understood?”
All hands agreed to this, but none more emphatically than Trask, who, by the way, was a little less proud of his feat now that it was put in this new and exceedingly awkward light.
“Very well, then, that’s settled,” declared Brian, characteristically dismissing the affair from his mind.
After this things settled down at Gonya’s Kloof, ordinarily and without incident. And yet, to me, so radical was the change compared with all my former life, that every day seemed replete with incident, even what to the others was mere ordinary routine. I threw myself with zest into everything, and both Brian and his father declared after a month or two that if I went on at this rate I should know as much as they could teach me before I had been with them a year, and already knew a great deal more than Trask did after four: a pronouncement which was exceedingly gratifying to me.