She took out her violin and played, while the men smoked, and the two Kaffirs, letting the oxen keep on in their way undirected, fell behind, drinking in the music with delight.
Chapter Seventeen.
Missing.
It seemed as though the suspicions about the designs of Groot Piet and Lieutenant Gobo were groundless, as for two weeks they trekked on without an obstacle, though Frank found it necessary to check the growing impertinence of the Kaffirs by knocking Klaas down out of hand one morning, and by flogging the leader with a doubled rheim—a hint which brought about the proper degree of respect due by a native to a white man. They reached the rolling bush country without further incident, and found greater objects of interest in the diversity of animal life.
One evening they drew up on a gentle rise above a river, and found themselves in the neighbourhood of a Boer trek. About thirty tent waggons, gleaming white in the dark, were drawn up in ranks of ten, their desselbooms all pointing to the north, and the space around thronged with troops of cattle and herds of goats and sheep. This was a party of “Doppers,” shifting ground to get away from the vain delights and irritating chatter of the uitlanders, who had invaded the South in the wake of the gold miners. Their austere piety had risen in arms, and they were now in search of a remote spot where their eyes would not be offended by the spectacle of ungodly merriment. Their thin nasal notes as they chanted an evening hymn cut through the air fraught with a spirit of hopeless despondency at the wickedness of all things human; but when the singing was over they allowed their morbid curiosity to draw them to the solitary waggon where one lovely woman, in outlandish costume, sat laughing with two of the despised uitlanders. The men, with their dark sombre faces, drew near to offer the accustomed hand-shake, but the women stood aloof, the younger ones giggling under their linen kapjes, and the elder standing stolidly, their hands folded in their aprons.
“Who are you, and whence do you come, if I may be bold enough to ask?” was the first question of the male spokesman; and when Hume had courteously responded, there was one word spoken, and that was “tabak.” A roll of tobacco was produced, plugs cut off, and shaved against the balls of big thumbs, all scarred with knife cuts and blackened with tobacco. The fragments were solemnly rolled between the broad palms, the pipes filled, and lit with coals from the fire; and the best flavour can only be drawn from tobacco by a wood coal.
Then they squatted down on their heels and stared solemnly, making observations enough to supply them with slow conversations for a week on the frivolous manners of the strangers.
Hume answered all the questions, and then asked for information himself, from which he learnt that they had arrived at a good place for a halt, grass being good and water plentiful, with game in fair numbers a few miles distant from the road. They were told of a vlei five miles off, where some of the large antelopes gathered at sunrise, and getting the direction from the stars, Frank and Webster determined to walk there that night, so as to lose no time.