“Yes,” I answered dryly, “and the man who gathered them used a very clean-cutting knife.”
“What man?”
“Come, Uncle, you have parted with my melons to someone else, and I consider you have behaved shabbily.”
“That’s it—go on. It isn’t enough that my hair should turn white in the loneliness of the dark at the dog-hopping terror that came out of the deep pool down below there, ’midst a fearful groaning in the air and a splashing in the water, but you must turn on me.”
“What became of those melons, you old shuffler?”
“I ain’t had a smoke for six days, and, on top of that, each morning I woke up with an empty pipe to find a melon missing.”
I handed him my pouch, and waited for explanations.
“Yes,” he said, ramming the tobacco down with his little finger; “six days ago when I came over here to watch them melons mopping in the sunshine I saw at once one was gone—and gone, too, without so much as leaving any sign but a straight cut through the stem to show how it went, not a footprint, nor a bruised leaf, nor anything. Yes, that was the smallest of the six; and next morning another was gone, the next biggest, and there was no mark on the ground. I tell you that want of sign made me queer, and when that night I yeard a splashing down there in the pool—and there’s no sound, mind you, that comes so mysterious as the sudden splash of water out of the night—I wondered if the Kaffir’s devil was climbing out of the pool, or if the little brown man, the Tikoloshe, was up to his mischief. There was that splash, loud and sudden, as if the big tail of a monstrous snake had come down smack on the water; then there was a humming all around me in the air. Have you got a match?”
He struck the match on his corduroys, lifting his knee to stretch the breeches taut, and his hollow cheeks nearly met inside as he puffed, then he held the glow of the expiring match before me.
“There was a humming in the air all around me, and my skin tingled all over jes’sif the wind were whipping the sand against my wet body when coming from a sea bathe, and in the centre of that melon patch I seed a spark of fire like that dying match, jes’ one dull spark of fire without any ray from it. That was all. Next morning the third melon was gone—clean gone.”