“Am I not colonial enough?” said John Ames, with a quiet laugh.
“N-no. At least, I don’t mean that—in fact, I don’t know what I do mean,” broke off Nidia, with a perfectly disarming frankness.
“Do you know Bulawayo at all?”
The diversion came from the third of the trio.
“Oh yes; I have just come from up that way.”
“Really. I wonder if you ever met my husband. He is a mining engineer. Bateman our name is.”
John Ames thought.
“The name doesn’t seem altogether unknown to me,” he said. “The fact is I am very seldom in Bulawayo. My district lies away out in the wilds, and very wild indeed it is.”
“What sort of a place is Bulawayo?”
“Oh, a creditable township enough, considering that barely three years ago it was a vast savage kraal, and, barring a few traders, there wasn’t a white man in the country.”