“Rather. Oh-h!” groaned Harry, whom at that moment a violent jerk banged against the side of the waggon. “Let’s get out of this, though. It’s awful!”
“Hold on a minute. We are just going through a drift.”
They looked out. The road sloped steeply down to the edge of a small river which swept purling between reed-fringed banks. The foremost oxen were already in the water. There was a little extra yelling and whip-cracking, and the great vehicle rolled ponderously through, and began toilsomely to mount the steep ascent on the other side. Gerard’s glance looked longingly at the water.
“Better wait till we outspan,” said Dawes, reading this. “We can’t stop now, and by the time you overtook us you’d be so fagged and hot you’d get no good at all out of your swim.”
The sun was hardly an hour high, and already it was more than warm. The sky was an unbroken and dazzling blue, and on every side lay the roll of the open veldt in a shimmer of heat, with here and there a farmhouse standing amid a cluster of blue gum-trees. The road seemed to be making a gradual ascent. Our two friends felt little inclined for walking now, for the beat of the morning, combined with short allowance of sleep during the past two nights, was beginning to tell.
“Jump up here, now,” said Dawes, flinging a couple of rugs on top of the load of goods. “Sun or no sun, you’ll be better off than in the tent. Canvas, with the sun on it, is almost as baking as corrugated iron. Hold hard. Wait till she stops,” he warned, having given orders to that effect. “Old stagers, like me, can jump on and off while trekking along, but you’d get under the wheels—sure—and then what’d Kingsland say?”
“You see,” he went on, when they were safely and comfortably on their perch, “in getting up and down by the disselboom you have to be fairly smart. You just get inside the fore wheel and walk along with the machine, and jump quietly up. Getting down’s the worst, because, if you hit the disselboom or slip on it, ten to one you get shot off bang in front of the wheel, and then nothing on earth’ll save you, for you can’t stop one of these waggons under fifty yards, sometimes not even then.”
“By Jove! Do many fellows come to grief that way?” asked Gerard.
“Heaps. You can hardly take up a paper anywhere without seeing a paragraph headed ‘The Disselboom again.’ But generally it’s when fellows are rather full up—taken a drop too much—you understand. Not always, of course. And when you think of the weight these waggons carry—this one’s loaded close on eleven thousand pounds, now—No, you’ve no show at all.”
Then at the morning’s outspan Gerard, always observant, and now keenly thirsting for experience, noted every detail—how there was a regular routine even in this apparently happy-go-lucky species of travel; how when the oxen were turned out to graze, the “driver” set to work to build the fire, while the “leader” took the bucket and went away to fetch water from the nearest stream or water-hole; how the natives received their daily ration of Indian corn meal, subsequently to be made into a thick stir-about and eaten piping hot from the three-legged pot in which it was cooked. He noted, too, with considerable satisfaction, how Dawes produced from a locker a goodly supply of raw mutton-chops, which were set to frizzle on the fire against the time they should have returned from their swim, which with the remainder of last night’s loaf and a steaming kettle of strong black coffee, made up the most succulent breakfast he thought he had ever eaten in his life, so thorough an appetiser is open air, and novelty, and travel. And then, after a long lie-by and a nap in the heat of the day, he begged to be allowed to bear a hand in the process of inspanning, and felt as proud as Punch when he found himself holding a couple of reims, at the end of which were as many big black oxen, even though he had but a confused idea as to what he should do with them. Still, he was doing something, and that was what he wanted to realise.