The list of killed and injured on the railway workings continued, and by the time the bridge of the Kat River was nearing completion and the line across Jackalsfontein almost laid, it made heavy reading for some wives and mothers, and a Government whose business it was to compensate them. The annoying part of the matter was that there were no shoulders upon which blame for the chapter of accidents could justly be laid. “Acts of Providence” cannot be quarrelled with. Though why “the Hand of God” should have fallen so heavily upon that special part of the line was incomprehensible to the gangers, who were inclined to insinuate that Lucifer (aided by a certain strange and monstrous-looking old man who sat eternally watching from his stoep) had more to do with the matter.
Nick Retief’s armchair no longer accommodated him. The large oak and leather settle from the kitchen had been brought out and in its broad seat he sat daily, his great head sunk on his breast, staring with blue eyes grown dim. He was now enormously swollen and of an extraordinary vivid colour. Rage and bitter anger had so poisoned his nature that it seemed, even as Chrissie in her simple way expressed it, as if his blood had “turned” or decomposed in his veins. Yet, despite its grotesqueness, there was something heart-rendingly pathetic in the figure of this old-time Boer who had fought to defeat Progress and been defeated instead.
He had to be helped to bed now, with Chrissie on one side and Shangaan Jim, his oldest Kaffir boy, supporting him on the other. But there came a night when they could not lead him to his bed; his bulk had so much increased during the day that it was in vain to try and pass him through the front door. Chrissie burst into tears.
“Oh! foy toch, my poor Poppey, what are we to do now?”
“Bring out my mattress. I will sleep here where I can see my land,” said the old man.
So they brought out his mattress, and he went to bed on the stoep. Shangaan Jim sat by him through the night, and, long after she had retired, Chrissie could hear his mumbling voice relating with many clicks and ejaculations tales of when he had worked in the mines at the Diamond Fields.
The next day at Nick Retief’s command the big iron and brass bedstead in which his wife had died was set up on the stoep. He slept in it, and again Shangaan Jim stayed by him relating strange stories. The morning after, the old man did not rise from his bed; only called to them to bring many pillows, and prop him up, so that he could see.
“It is nearly finished,” he muttered staring across the blue-gum stumps that now were bursting into great clusters of silvery blue leaves, “and I am nearly finished too.”
The two thin lines of steel glittering under the moonbeams had, in fact, almost reached the eastern boundary-line of Jackalsfontein. Soon the old man’s eyes would be pained no longer by the piles of wood and steel, the tents and paraphernalia of the camp. Shangaan Jim brought the news that all would be removed next day. Chrissie found him whispering by the bedside as the sun went down, and wondered to see a smile on her father’s face for the first time in many months—if that strange distortion of bloated and discoloured flesh could be called a smile?