“Ah! well,” put in the old settler. “Perhaps we’ll be able to find you something in the way of excitement here, if that’s what you were in search of, and that before very long, too. All isn’t so quiet here as they try to make out. I’ve lived on the frontier, man and boy, all my life, and I can see pretty plainly that there’s mischief brewing.”
“Is there? I did hear something of the sort on my way up, now I think of it; but I had an idea that the days of war were over, and that Jack Kafir had got his quietus.”
“Ha! ha! Had you really, now? Why, bless my soul, the Kafirs are far more numerous than ever; they outnumber us by fifty to one. They hate us as much as ever they did, and for some time past have been steadily collecting guns and ammunition. Now, what do they want those guns and that ammunition for? Not for hunting, for there’s next to no game in all Kafirland. No, it is to put them on an equal footing with us; and then, with their numbers, they think to have it all their own way. There’s mischief brewing, mark my words.”
“It wouldn’t mean a scrimmage among themselves, would it? They might be anxious to exterminate each other,” ventured Claverton.
The other smiled significantly, and was about to reply, when the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of supper and—Hicks.
The latter was one of those young Englishmen often met with on colonial farms, learning their business in the capacity of assistant, or general factotum; and who may be divided into two categories: those who take kindly to the life and throw themselves thoroughly into it and its interests, and those who don’t, and leave it after a trial. Our friend Hicks may be placed in the former of these. He was a strong, energetic, good-tempered fellow, who loved his calling, and was a favourite with everybody. He had served three years in the Frontier Mounted Police, and had been two with Mr Brathwaite, and, by virtue of so much hard, healthy, open-air life, was twice the man he had been when he left his father’s Midlandshire parsonage five years previously.
“You were asking if the Kafirs might not be preparing for a fight among themselves?” resumed the old settler as they took their places at the supper-table, which looked cheerful and homelike in the extreme. He had got upon a favourite hobby, and was not to be diverted from a congenial ride. “There isn’t the slightest chance of it, because they know very well we shan’t let them. We prefer encouraging them to hammer away at us.”
“Pickling a rod for our own backs?” remarked Claverton.
“Just so. By patching up their tribal disputes we check just so much salutary blood-letting, and foster hordes of lazy, thieving rascals right on our border. Even if the sham philanthropy, under which we groan, obliges us to sit still while the savages grow fat on our stolen cattle and laugh at us, the least it could do would be to allow them to cut a few of each other’s throats when they have a mind to.”
“The Home Government, I suppose?”