“Yes, it’s ready now. Come on in. Bring the shooters inside. It isn’t safe to leave them in the cart with all these loafers about.”
The while they had been outspanning, and now, handing over the horses to a native stable-boy, they entered.
“I say, what about the war?” said Dick to the hotel-keeper, as the latter came in to see how they were getting on. “Think there’ll be one?”
“Well, Mr Selmes, I don’t know what to say. But one can only hope not.”
Dick dropped his knife and fork, and stared.
“Hope not?” he echoed. “But think what a lot of fun we shall be done out of.”
The hotel-keeper laughed good-naturedly.
“Fun?” he said. “Well, it may be fun to you, but it’ll be death to some of us, as some fable-mongering feller said about something else—I forget what. It may be all very well for young gentlemen with plenty of money, wandering about the world on the look-out for excitement; but for us ordinary chaps who’ve got to make a living—and not an easy one at that—it spells anything but fun I can tell you. What price my place being sacked and burnt to the ground some fine night? I’ve got a wife and kiddies too—what if we didn’t get long enough warning to clear them off to Komgha quick enough? Well, that’s what war spells to us.”
“By George! I never thought of it in that light,” cried Dick Selmes, to whom the other’s quiet but good-natured reproof appealed thoroughly. “But—surely you’d get warning in time, wouldn’t you?”
“Warning. Look at those chaps out there”—designating the groups of Kafirs, now momentarily increasing, in front of the canteen, some of them visible from the window. “Some fine day they come along just as you see them now, only with businesslike assegais hidden under their blankets. Then, a sudden signal and a rush, and—where do we come in? Kafirs don’t give warning, they take you on the hop; ain’t I right, Greenoak?”