“Never mind. All the more reason why we should make a thorough good thing of it while we are about it,” said another, of more cheerful disposition. “We’ll teach Jack Kafir a lesson this time, that he’ll remember.”
Thus talking, they sat round that red camp-fire, which threw a fitful glow upon bronzed faces and attire, fantastic-looking in the semi-darkness and in its wild picturesqueness, until at length the bugle sounded, “lights out,” and gradually all subsided to silence. Now and again the yelp and snarl of a jackal came up from beneath, where lay the unburied corpses of the slain foe, and where a number of heaps of black smouldering ashes were all that remained of what in the morning had been the Kraal of the Paramount Chief of Kafirland.
Note 1. In war-time, when lead is scarce, Kafirs manufacture tolerably efficient slugs by cutting up the legs of their iron cooking-pots.
Volume Two—Chapter Nine.
A Lull in the Storm.
A dry, scorching wind is whirling the pungent red dust-clouds along the streets of King Williamstown, and early though it be, not much more than nine o’clock, life is at the moment exceeding unpleasant for dwellers in the Kaffrarian capital as the hot blast sweeps down the wide streets and over the great arid square, powdering the thirsty eucalyptus trees with a layer of sand, penetrating even the coolest and tightest of houses. A day on which an easy-chair and nankeen garments seem absolute necessities, and yet in the busy frontier town there is as much life and stir as usual. Waggons load and unload before the principal stores; their oxen standing or lying in the yokes, poor and attenuated, for the season is a bad one indeed, further up, the country is suffering from a veritable drought. Men move about singly or by twos and threes, some in the semi-military uniform affected by officers holding a command in some frontier corps, others lightly clad and in broad sombrero-like hat or pith helmet. Round the native shops and canteens bronzed Kafirs squat and jabber, or, jumping on their weedy, undersized nags, dash off at a gallop down the street. Here and there, a Police trooper, the snow-white cover of his peaked cap gleaming in the son, rides briskly away from the telegraph office, and the scarlet uniforms of a detachment of regulars, as they march up from the river, returning from their morning bathe, make a glow of shining colour in the close, dusty street. It is an ill wind, however, that blows nobody good, as the drinking-bars could testify; for the number of persons who enter those useful institutions in the course of the morning—each and all with precisely the same remark, that it being externally so dry they stand all the more in need of a wet within—is so large that I will not attempt to reveal it.
Leaving the stir and the whirl of the brisk trading centre, we will pass to a comparatively quiet quarter. In the verandah of a small house, on the outskirts of the town, some one is standing, looking intently through a pair of field-glasses, which are levelled at a distant object, evidently a horseman rapidly approaching by the road leading from the Transkei. For a moment she stands eager and motionless, gazing with all her might at that dusty road in the distance; then a red flush of disappointment tinges the beautiful face as she drops the glass from her eyes, and the graceful, erect figure suddenly assumes an unconscious droop.