In spite of all the mishaps, everyone was kind and good-natured. No one offered blows or taunts to Poppy, and her starved heart revived a little and began to hold up its head under the gentle rain of kindliness and friendliness. Then, the glamour of travel was upon her for the first time. Never before had she seen the hills, the mountains, the great rolling spaces of veldt, the rivers sweeping and boiling down their wide ravines. It was most wonderful and beautiful, too, to wake every dawn and step out of the wagon to a fresh world. Where last night had been a hill, to-morrow would be a rushing river, befringed with mimosa, whose odour had been sweet on the breeze all the day before. The next day would find them on a bare plain, with no stick or stone to give shelter from the burden of the sun or the rain, and the next they would lie in the purple shadow of a mountain, on which were scarlet geraniums as tall as trees, and strange flowers shaped like birds and insects grew everywhere.
And oh! the fresh glory of the morning dews! The smell of the wood smoke on the air! The wide open empty world around them and the great silence into which the small human sounds of the camp fell and were lost like pebbles thrown into the sea! Happy, rain-soaked, sun-bitten days! Bloemfontein and misery were a long way behind. Poppy's sad songs were all forgotten; new ones sprang up in her heart, songs flecked with sunlight and bewreathed with wild flowers.
But a cloud was on the horizon. The convoy of wagons drew at last near its destination. Poppy began to be haunted at nights with the fear of what new trouble must await her there. Where would she go? What would she do? How could she face kind Mrs. Brant with her tale of parents and friends proved false? These frightful problems filled the nights in the creaking wagon with terror. The misty bloom that had fallen upon her face during the weeks of peace and content, vanished, and haggard lines of anxiety and strain began to show.
"Child, you look peaky," said good Mrs. Brant. "What'll your ma say? I must give you a Cockle's pill."
But Poppy grew paler and more peaky.
Two days' trek from Pretoria she was missed at inspan time. Long search was made. The wagons even waited a whole day and night for her; the boys called and the drivers sent cracks of their great whips volleying and echoing for miles, as a signal of their whereabouts in case she had wandered far and lost her bearings. At night they made enormous fires to guide her to their camping-places. But she never returned. It was then and for the first time that two little lines of verse came into the memory of Alice, the eldest girl, who had been at a good school. She recited them to the family, who thought them passing strange and prophetic:
"But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen."
Unfortunately, after leaving the wagons and hiding herself in a deep gulch, Poppy had fallen asleep, and that so heavily after her many nights of sleepless worry, that she did not awake for more than fourteen hours. When she did wake she found that some poisonous insect or reptile had stung one of her feet terribly: it was not painful, but enormously swollen and discoloured, and she found it difficult to get along. The wagons had gone and she could never catch up with them again, even if she wished. On the second night she heard, many miles away, the cracking of the whips and saw little glow-worms of light that might have been the flare of fires lighted to show her the way back to the wagons; and her spirit yearned to be with those friendly faces and kindly fires. She wept and shivered and crouched fearsomely in the darkness.