It was—and a strange figure he cut as at that moment he appeared round a bend in the track. A middle-sized, plebeian-looking man, mounted on a sorry nag. His hair, and the wispy scraps of beard stuck about his parchment-coloured visage, were of a neutral tint; and a snub nose, and projecting lower jaw, in no wise prepossessed one towards the individual. He was arrayed in a rusty suit of black, and a dirty white tie was stuck half in half out of the throat of his clerical waistcoat, and he sat his horse “like a tailor;” but the most grotesque article of this out-of-keeping costume was his hat—a reduced “chimney-pot,” with a huge puggaree wound turban-wise about the crown, the ends falling down over the wearer’s back.
“Bah!” exclaimed Claverton. “Why, it’s a parson. What the deuce can he be doing here?”
The stranger’s countenance lighted up with satisfaction at sight of the pair.
“This is a relief,” he said. “I thought I should never get out of this dreadful bush alive.”
“Where were you going to?” asked Claverton. “I was going to take a short cut through to Cathcart. They told me the way was safe, and now I find it isn’t. The whole bush is full of Kafirs. I could hear them calling to each other in every direction.”
“Quite sure it wasn’t baboons?”
“Oh, yes; I saw them—hundreds of them. Luckily they didn’t see me. It was in trying to avoid them that I lost myself.”
“Where did you say they were?” went on Claverton. He had formed no very high opinion of his new acquaintance, who informed him that his name was Swaysland, and that he was a missionary.
“Over in that next kloof. But you are not going on, surely? The way is not safe, indeed it is not.”
“We are, though—straight. But I—”