Daylight passed, and was superseded by a great white moon that diffused mother-of-pearl light. Hour after hour the waggon rumbled forward, but at last the wheels creaked over grass and shrub and came to a stop. There were native cries and shouts, the clatter of falling yokes, the low moo of tired oxen. Then newly lighted fires began to crackle and presently a ravishing odour of meat grilling over embers came stealing into the waggon tent. A head showed at the opening.
“Well! how d’you feel now, hey?”
“Better, thank you,” she answered politely. Her voice was a contralto and quite deep enough to pass for a boy’s.
“Oh! better, thank you, hey?” he rudely mimicked. “Ready for a buck steak, I bet!”
She did not at all like this man’s ways and manners, but it seemed politic at this time to disguise her feelings. For one thing, she was horribly hungry. For another, she realised that it was in his power to be intensely disagreeable if she offended him. Just how disagreeable a man with such a mouth could be she did not care to contemplate.
“I am certainly very hungry,” she answered quietly.
“Come on down, then. You don’t expect me to bring it to you, do you?”
“Of course not!” She made haste to descend, and take her place before the packing-case on which the supper was laid. She thought she had never tasted anything in her life so delicious as that chunk of antelope-steak, gritty with cinders, and flavoured with smoke. At the end of twenty minutes or so, the man remarked:
“Nothing wrong with your appetite, I see, whatever the sun has done to your kop.”
Vivienne did not know what a kop was, but her guessing powers were unimpaired.