Ten men, sitting loosely in their saddles, were all there were—big, gaunt men with shaggy beards and lined faces of the colour of smoked leather. Of untanned leather, too, were their trousers and veldschoens. Each one carried his food in the small saddle-bag of “rattel” skin, food of the scantiest—a strip of biltong, a pound or two of “ash cookies”—and slung from each bent shoulder was the powder-flask and bullet-bag.
Ten men and a boy—and he alone showed excitement in the brightness of his brown eyes and the firm set of his mouth. A boy so brown that you would have said he was of coloured origin, and with clothes so worn that no street boy would have envied him. A sullen boy and dull of wit you would have thought from his narrow forehead and bent brows, but there was one who did not think so.
“Oh, my kind!” she said, standing by the gate in the quince hedge; “they do not want one so young. And there is the wood to be brought in.”
“Ja!” said one burgher, taking his pipe from his mouth; “he is altogether too young for this work. Let him stay.”
“Hear to Oom Jan,” cried the woman, stepping across a tiny stream that gurgled pleasantly in its narrow bed beside the road; and she laid a restraining hand on the old rheim that did service for the boy’s reins. “Come, my son—my little one.”
The boy looked steadily at his mother. “I am not little any more,” he said.
“It is true,” said the big man who led the little band, turning slowly in his saddle. “He is no longer little. He must come!”
The woman let go her hold and stood back humbly, while her tear-stained face was turned appealingly at the man—her own man; and the burghers, smoking, took advantage of the pause to look back at their own wives and children, who stood out in the solitary street, drawing comfort from each other.
“We must all give,” he said.
“Why should I give all?” she cried with renewed hope. “My husband and my son. Let him stay. Oh! let him stay!”