“Can’t help it,” retorted the old man. “I know what I’m talking about, which is more than everybody does who professes to give an opinion on the subject. Any grocer’s boy, who in England would never get further than a shop-counter, makes a fine good trade of it by coming out here to ‘preach the Gospel’ to the heathen. It’s less trouble and pays infinitely better. What is the consequence? Kafirland is chock-full of bumptious, uneducated, hypocritical scamps, who live on the fat of the land, and are never happy unless meddling with what doesn’t concern them. All the disturbances which crop up from time to time, are hatched and fomented by these rascals. Call themselves teachers, indeed! What do they teach their lambs? To keep their hands off their neighbours’ property? Not a bit of it. And what missionary ever stuck to his post when war did break out, I should like to know? Not one. They clear out in time to save their own skins, never fear, and sneak off to befool the British public, while we are defending our lives and property. A set of meddlesome, mischief-brewing, slander-mongering frauds. They are the curse of the colony.”
On this congenial theme the old man continued to descant for some time. Then the tread of horses was heard outside, and the arrival of Hicks and Thorman created a diversion.
“So the bridge has gone,” said Mr Brathwaite, dropping the missionary question. “I thought it would. It should have been built ten feet higher from the first. This flood, though, is a flood, and no mistake. I only remember one like it.”
“Ha, ha?” laughed Thorman, who was quite in a genial mood. “You should have seen Hicks pitching into a transport-rider. He doubled him up by the roadside like a ninepin.”
“And how would he double up a ninepin, Mr Thorman?” queried Ethel, mischievously.
Meanwhile, Hicks looked sheepish. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “The fellow challenged me.”
As predicted, the flood did an immense amount of damage. Every bridge was torn away by the force of the waters, as if it had been a bit of stick. Homesteads by the river-side flooded or swept away; gardens and corn lands swamped and utterly laid waste; every runnel or golly washed out as clean as a tube, the piles of drift-wood and rubbish, deposited here and there on their banks, alone showing the height to which the waters had risen. And when in a few days the rain ceased, and it was practicable to ascertain the fall extent of devastation—though even then in parts of the veldt it was impossible to ride with any safety or comfort, for a horse would sink knee-deep in the spongy soil—the land was noisome with the carcases of drowned animals, sheep and goats lying by tens and by twenties rotting in the sun in roadway and golly.
Note 1. Hottentots with an admixture of white blood are thus known in Colonial parlance.