“But we won’t. Aha, I know why you don’t want us. You have never done that sort of thing before, and you don’t want us to see you make a bad shot and run round the kraal with a cow after you. That’s it, isn’t it, Mr Jeffreys?” turning to him. She was in a bright, teasing mood, and looked bewitchingly pretty.
Jeffreys chuckled to himself at Claverton’s expense, as he thought, and mumbled something about “it being dangerous for her.”
“Dangerous! Not a bit of it. We shall stand outside and look over the gate, and we shall be perfectly safe.”
Hicks looked up from his plate with a low whistle.
“Perfectly safe!” he reiterated. “Why, it was only last branding that that big black and white ox of Jim’s, after chevying Tambusa twice round the kraal and knocking him down, jumped the gate, charged a big hencoop that was pitched close by and threw it fifty feet in the air, and then streaked off to the bush like a mad buffalo.”
“What nonsense, Ethel! Of course you can’t go,” said her aunt, who had re-entered the room during this conversation. “Why, the things often break out of the kraal.”
“Very well, aunt, I don’t want to be a witness to poor Mr Claverton’s discomfiture;” and she cast at him a glance of petulance, mingled with compassion, whose effect upon the object thereof was absolutely nil.
A business-like appearance was that of the scene of operations. The animals were standing quietly about the large enclosure seventy yards in diameter, with its solid, bristling thorn-fence eight or nine feet high and its massive five-barred gate. In the centre burnt—or rather smouldered, for it was of the red-hot glowing order—a great fire, over which bent the bronzed form of Xuvani, the cattle-herd, superintending the due heating of the branding-irons and gossiping in subdued gutturals with the other “hands”—two Kafirs and a smart, wiry little Hottentot, who, with the penchant of his race for scriptural appellations, rejoiced in the time-honoured and patriarchal one of Abram. Xuvani was a man of between fifty and sixty, of middle height, and of powerful, almost herculean build; the muscles stood out upon his limbs like great ropes, and a blow from his fist—that is, if he had known how to make use of his fists, which Kafirs very seldom do know—would have sufficed to fell an ox. He was rather light in colour, and his beard and woolly head were just shot with grey; there was shrewdness in his rugged features, and a twinkle of satiric humour lurked in his eye. He had been a long time in the service of his present master, who had found him a cut above the average Kafir in honesty and trustworthiness. Moreover, he was greatly looked up to by the other natives, not only on account of his great physical strength, but also as one who had shown his prowess in a marked manner during the wars which have been alluded to. Although far from quarrelsome by nature, Xuvani never needed a second challenge. His kerries were all ready, as more than one party of Fingoes passing Seringa Vale in search of employment could testify, to its sorrow. Indeed, once he had expiated his share in one of these African Donnybrooks by a sentence of several months in gaol.
“Well, Xuvani!” sang out Hicks, as they slipped off their jackets and flung them on to the kraal fence—“Got the iron hot? All right, let’s begin. Now then, Piet—what the devil are you standing there for, grinning like a Cheshire cat? Lay hold of the reim and catch that heifer.”
Piet, a stalwart Kafir, grinned all the harder, and drawing out the running noose of the reim he made a cast, then, as the heifer ran over it, with a mighty jerk he drew it taut and the animal, noosed by the hind leg, fell. Before it could rise again they all threw themselves upon it, and in a trice its legs were securely bound while two men firmly held its head. In a second Hicks had taken the branding-iron from one of the Kafirs, and held it for half a minute lightly but firmly pressed against the fleshy part of the thigh. The poor brute groaned and struggled violently as it felt the hot iron; there was a sharp, hissing sound from the singeing hair, a foetid smoke arose, diffusing a smell of burnt flesh, and the operation was complete. Whatever danger there is in the performance generally falls to the lot of him who releases the victim, which not unfrequently, as soon as it feels its logs again, fiercely charges its emancipator, all the others having previously withdrawn themselves behind some of the other cattle standing about the kraal. The first animal, however, was not of an inherently vicious nature. Consequently, no sooner was it free than it ran off among its kindred, greatly scared and bewildered. All went merrily enough till they had got a fine black and white cow under the iron. She lay still, but there was rage mingled with pain in her groaning.