He showed her the action, and made her snap it from the shoulder. Then she inserted a cartridge.
“Press the butt tightly to the shoulder, bring the left elbow well down, and press with your thumb as you pull the trigger.”
She fired, and then practised at a mark.
Chapter Twenty.
A Mysterious Cry.
For the next fortnight they struggled with the difficulties of the road, and Hume had to call to his aid all his resources in navigating his ship of the desert over boulder-strewn streams, up almost impracticable heights, and down dangerous slopes, wherever the road zig-zagged above yawning precipices. His bared arms grew black under the sun, and by the time the Limpopo was reached he resembled in appearance one of the scattered Boer farmers whom they occasionally surprised in their journey—a man tanned to the colour of his own well-worn corduroys, with a face lined by the drying of the skin, the eyes narrowed through the constant effort to shut out the over-powerful light, and hands bruised, knotted and grimed. In this toilsome trek Webster had to squire Miss Anstrade, and since she dreaded the sight of the oxen straining under the yoke, and would get away from the sharp crack of the long whip, he was thrown much into her company as they walked on ahead for the next outspan. In the loneliness of the slow marches Hume soured rather, and in the evening by the fire it was some time before his silent fit would thaw to the needs of companionship, and the others, having exhausted every topic during the day’s tête-à-tête, made little effort to dispel the gloom. In the veld there are few topics that can outlast a week, and then there is little to fall back upon but the eternal subject of religion, or the ways of nature. Wherever nature is uninteresting and the population is scattered, the mind of man fastens like a limpet on the rock of some verity of the Scriptures, or to the decaying trunk of superstition, and holds on to the end. The Boers in the Transvaal have quarrelled among themselves over their belief, and President Kruger has taken up his rifle in defence of a verse in the Psalms. Our friends had played about on the outskirts of religious controversy about the camp fire; but the men had been firmly checked by Miss Anstrade, who possessed a woman’s unquestioning faith, and latterly they had become abstracted and dull, while Klaas, the Gaika, crooned to himself the legends that hung about the dark kloofs of his own far-distant Amatolas.
“Thank God!” said Hume, as he threw down his whip on the far side of the great river, “we have at last got out of the Transvaal.”
“It seemed to me,” said Miss Anstrade, “that we were going on for ever until the waggon fell to pieces, and we grew too old to see. I have never been so dull in all my life, and am convinced there is a growth of fungus on my brain.”