“So we do. But several of us came down here for a change of air, and now the Company won’t let us go back because of the threatened trouble with Lobengula.”
“Is Dick all right?”
“Oh, quite; but he couldn’t get away. I’ll tell you all about it presently. Are you going to get down here, or let Hendricks drive you to my hut?”
“Oh, do you live in a hut, Judy? How delightful! I’m longing to live in one. No, I’d rather not get down here. You direct the driver where to go.”
She dropped from the step, and I heard her talking in her languid voice to the people all round and giving directions to the driver, who was still slinging mail-bags and handing out packages to people who all peered in and tried to get glimpses of me. There was an enormous amount of chatter and laughing, and a man, presumably the postmaster, was making a terrible scene with Hendricks because a mail-bag was missing. But Hendricks was impervious to insult. He merely replied:
“I drive Zeederberg’s mules, don’t I? Well! What you asking me about the scarlet mail-bag for? Allemagte!”
A stream of wicked words flowed eloquently from his lips, English and Dutch all mixed up together and sounding like successive explosions of bombshells. However, there was some one in the crowd who did not approve of Hendricks’s vocabulary at all:
“Stop that, Hendricks. What do you mean?” a voice demanded.
Hendricks was instantly silent, and having at last emptied his cart of all but me and my luggage, he grabbed the reins sullenly and drove off muttering to himself:
“I drive Zeederberg’s mules, don’t I?” with some phrases appended which startled even the mules. Judy had told him to drive straight to her hut, but he pulled up first at Swears’s and got a drink of soup in a glass; at least he called it a “soopie,” though the aroma that reached me was not of soup at all, but the same old black-bottle, cold-tea aroma that I had known all the way up, and that would for ever be associated in my mind with South African scenery.