Seated in front of the foremost waggon, smoking their pipes, are two white men, also travel-stained and dusty. In one of them we have no difficulty in recognising the weather-tanned lineaments and impassive expression of John Dawes. The other countenance—well, we might have some difficulty in recognising the owner, might excusably hesitate before pronouncing it to be that of our friend, Gerard Ridgeley. Yet he it is.
For those few months of healthy open-air life have done wonders for Gerard—have wrought a greater change in him than the same number of years spent under ordinary conditions would have done. They have, in fact, made a man of him. His frame has broadened and his muscles are set. There is a firm, self-reliant look in his face, now bronzed to the hue of that of John Dawes himself, and he has grown a beard. In short, any one who saw him now would pronounce him to have become a remarkably fine-looking fellow.
By no means all fun has Gerard found that up-country trading trip. Of toil—hard, prosaic, wearying—plenty has come his way. There have been times, for instance, when every muscle has been strained and aching with the labour of digging out the waggons, stuck fast over axle-deep in a mud hole—digging them out only to see them plunge in again deeper than ever; or again in offloading everything, and carrying the whole cargo piecemeal up some short but rugged acclivity impossible to avoid, and up which the great vehicles could only be drawn empty. Half fainting beneath the burning glare of a well-nigh tropical sun—toiling amid the sheeting downpour of days of rain, and that too often on a ration of mealies or hard biscuit, and a little brack or muddy water—he has never yet dreamed of shirking, never complained.
That trek, too, of nearly forty-eight hours over a parched land, where each expected water-hole was a mere surface of cracked and baked mud, and the oxen with hanging tongues and saliva-dropping jaws could hardly pull half a mile per hour, and the night was as brassy as the day, and their wanderings and divergences far and wide in search of the necessary fluid was rewarded with greater exhaustion than ever, and the red surface of the burning veldt stretched grim and forbidding to the sky-line, mocking them now and again with a fair mirage—that terrible time when they sat together on the waggon in silence and wondering what the end would be, or rather when it would be, then, too, no word of complaint had escaped Gerard.
Of dangers too he has borne his share. He can recall the horde of turbulent and aggressive natives crowding round the waggon of which he was in sole charge, when during a whole day his life and the lives of the two “boys” seemed to hang upon a hair,—nights spent in lonely watches, in an insecure and semi-hostile land, expecting the spears of predatory savages in the treacherous darkness. That other night, too, when he was lost in the veldt and had to lie out in the open, with hardly time to construct a hurried enclosure and collect sufficient firewood ere darkness fell, and to this slender protection alone had he been forced to trust for the safety of himself and his horse. Hardly till his dying day will he forget those terrible eyes flaming red in the light of his scanty fire, as a pair of prowling lions roared around his frail breastwork the long night through. These are but some of the dangers, some of the privations which have fallen to his lot. Yet as he looks back upon them all it is regretfully. He cannot feel unqualified satisfaction that the trip is drawing to a close.
For it is drawing to a close. With all its perils and hardships it has been a very fairly successful one, as the sheep and cattle which they are driving before them serve to show. So also do such other articles of barter as can be carried in the waggons, which latter, however, are travelling light; for nearly all the stock-in-trade has been disposed of.
Rumours have from time to time reached them in Swaziland and beyond, with regard to the state of Zulu affairs, and the latest of such reports has moved Dawes to decide to avoid the Zulu country, and re-enter Natal by way of the Transvaal. So to-morrow the southward course will be changed to a westward one, and the trek will be pursued along the north bank of the Pongolo.
During the months our friends had spent up-country, diplomatic relations between the Zulus and the British had become strained to a dangerous tension. Both parties were eyeing each other and preparing for war.
Seated on the waggon as aforesaid, our two friends are talking over the situation.
“We had better give them a wide berth, Ridgeley, until we get all this plunder safe home,” Dawes was saying. “Even now we are nearer the Pongolo than I like, and in the north of Zululand there’s a pretty thorough-paced blackguard or two, in the shape of an outlying chief who wouldn’t think twice of relieving us of all our travelling stock, under colour of the unsettled times—Umbelini, for instance, and that other chap they’re beginning to talk about, Ingonyama; though I don’t altogether believe that cock-and-bull story about the blood-drinking tribe—the Igazipuza. It’s too much like a Swazi lie. Still, I shall be glad when we are safe home again.”