“Peculiar, you said,” he went on. “Yes, that I can believe. Do you know, Vine, the first Sunday I went over there, I had a queer experience. You know that big mountain on their place just opposite the house— Sipazi it is called?” The doctor nodded. “Well then, they took me up there in the afternoon to show me the view. You’ll remember that tremendous krantz that literally overhangs the valley?” Again the other nodded. “Well there’s a beast of a tree that grows out from its brink, horizontally at first, then upwards. There’s just room for one—fool, I was nearly saying—or one and a half, to sit on it. Well what does the young lady do but climb down and sit on it as if she was in an armchair on the stoep at home. It turned me nearly sick to see her do it, I can tell you.”
“I daresay.”
“That’s not all. She skipped up again, and—invited me to do the same.”
“And did you?”
“Well I had to. It was in the nature of a challenge, you see. I tell you squarely and as man to man, I would willingly have forfeited a year’s pay to have got out of it—when I got on to the beastly log, I believe I would have forfeited five. But how could I have backed out of doing a thing a girl had just done, and thought nothing of? Ugh! it gives me the cold shivers all down the back even now, to look back on those few moments when I sat, hung out in mid-air, over that ghastly height. And, you must remember the krantz slopes away inwards from the top just there. Ugh!”
Vine sat back in his chair and chuckled. Elvesdon was obviously an imaginative chap, he was saying to himself. Why, as he told the story he was going through the experience again, and part of its horror had taken hold on him.
“Well, what did she say when you came back?” he said.
“That I was the only one besides herself who had ever done it. She had asked several, and they had all cried off. I don’t say it to brag, mind—in proof whereof I don’t mind adding that she said she could see I was in a beastly funk all the time, because my hand on the branch of the infernal tree shook, and, by the Lord, it did.”
“Reminds one of the old yam about the lady and the knight and the jay’s nest on the castle wall,” said the doctor. “Never mind, Elvesdon. I’m one of those who funked going on it. She asked me to once.”
“The devil she did.”