Chapter Three.
Cats’ Calls.
“Originality, like beauty, is a fatal gift.”
Once more I was alone in the coach with my driver, moving onwards towards my destination—Fort Salisbury. In an hour or two I should reach Fort George, which was only a day or so from my journey’s end. My new driver, also a Cape boy, was a big, honest-looking fellow named Hendricks, one of the most trusted men in the coach service, and possessing no traits in common with the last man, except a vocabulary and an affection for “cold tea.” This man had been waiting at the other side of the river with fresh mules and another cart the morning after my adventurous night on the banks of the Umzingwani. The river had been still too full to cross by cart, so a wire apparatus for slinging mails and passengers from one bank to another had been brought into requisition. My new friend and the driver (grown curiously meek and submissive after I know not what threats and imprecations flung at him in an unknown tongue when he emerged from his fastness into the light of day) then engaged together in furthering a nerve-racking business of which I was to be the chief victim. First the mails were taken out and divided into lots weighing about 130 pounds, then each lot was placed in a sort of canvas bucket and slung across the broad sweeping stream on a piece of wire about the thickness of a clothes-line. When all the mails were over, and my luggage, I thought my turn had come and advanced with what I hoped was a nonchalant air (though my knees were trembling under me) to my fate. But the blue-eyed man was already in the bucket and whizzing across the stream. Half-way over the wire sagged hideously, and the sack touched the water. I closed my eyes with a sick feeling, and when I opened them again it was to see him just starting to recross. As he jumped from the bucket on my side of the river once more, I realised that he had been trying the wire for me. Then my nonchalance was not all assumed, as I took my turn in the horrible contrivance, for what had carried him would surely bear me safely. All the same, it was sickening to feel the slither of the bag on the wire, to see the grey-yellow water shining beneath me smooth and waveless as a mighty torrent of cod-liver oil, to experience the sag in midstream and the extra jerk of the wire to overcome it. I confess that at that moment I was not captain of my soul. I was not captain of anything, even the canvas bag! I should have given up the ghost if I had not known that a strong brown hand was on the wire, and blue keen eyes watching every movement. I think it was the most effarouchant of all my experiences, and I was still rather limp when he, having crossed once more, came to me standing by the new post-cart. He held out his hand.
“But what are you going to do?” I asked in surprise.
“Going back across the river,” said he. “I have just come over to say good-bye.”
“Are you not coming on too?”
“Not just yet. First I have a little business to transact on the other side. Later, I shall take my horse and swim a drift I know of about three miles lower down.”
I stared at him in astonishment. What business could he possibly have on the other side of the river, unless it was to skin the lion? Then I suddenly remembered his threatening words about the driver the night before, and the man’s meek mien that morning.