Chapter Fifteen.
The End of the Tiger.
I had been busy all day ‘branding’ the young cattle, and returning hot, dusty, and tired to the house, found Abe Pike comfortably seated in the cane chair, with the veldschoens of his outspread feet resting on the top bar of the verandah rail, and his lined face looking up at the thatched roof, whence came the loud zing of a bluebottle fly caught in the meshes of a spider web. A jar of my Transvaal tobacco was on the ground by his side, and a large jug of buttermilk near it.
“Don’t disturb yourself, Uncle!”
“I’m not agoing to. Mind how you step, else you’ll obset that buttermilk—not that it would matter much, for it ain’t been rightly made. Should ha’ been kep’ in a calabash with a drop of old milk in the bottom, to flavour it with a taste of biled leather and smoke that belongs to the proper article. But all the old arts is dying out, and insects and beasts is the only critturs that keep up the old customs. Conservatism is a law of nature—among men who have broken away from nature it’s a blind, unreasonin’ protest against change. Conservatism is the preserving wisdom of the aged, the salt of experience, and change is born of the rashness of youth. I’m a Conservative—I’m old. I should be presarved for the edification and guidance of the young. Give me the buttermilk.”
As he would not move, I tilted his chair over by kicking the legs away, and passed over his recumbent body to the bedroom. After a wash down I found him still outspread on the ground, his long legs hooked over the chair, and his head resting on his arm, while the glow of his pipe showed that he was still calmly smoking.
“What’s brought you over here, Uncle?”
“Well, I ’spect I walked. Have you ever observed, sonny, that the human body is so built that it will fit itself to any position? This is comfortable and the tobacco is fair to middlin’, fair to middlin’, with a touch of sulphur in it.”
I sat down on the stone steps to listen to the most delightful of all sounds—those made by the domestic animals and birds settling to rest; while from the deep black of the sky the stars shot out with a sudden blaze, and the cool night wind came softly whispering through the acacias.
Uncle Abe gathered himself up, and bunched upon the rail, his back bent like a sickle to keep his balance. “What’s acrost over yonder?” he said.