CHAPTER I
COMRADES
Some degree of normality seemed to come back into Sylvia's life with her return to Blue Hill Farm. She found plenty to do there, and she rapidly became accustomed to her surroundings.
It would have been a monotonous and even dreary existence but for the fact that she rode with Burke almost every evening, and sometimes in the early morning also, and thus saw a good deal of the working of the farm. Her keen interest in horses made a strong bond of sympathy between them. She loved them all. The mares and their foals were a perpetual joy to her, and she begged hard to be allowed to try her powers at breaking in some of the young animals. Burke, however, would not hear of this. He was very kind to her, unfailingly considerate in his treatment of her, but by some means he made her aware that his orders were to be respected. The Kaffir servants were swift to do his bidding, though she did not find them so eager to fulfil their duties when he was not at hand.
She laughingly commented upon this one day to Burke, and he amazed her by pointing to the riding-whip she chanced to be holding at the time.
"You'll find that's the only medicine for that kind of thing," he said. "Give 'em a taste of that and they'll respect you!"
She decided he must be joking, but only a few days later he quite undeceived her on that point by dragging Joe, the house boy, into the yard and chastising him with a sjambok for some neglected duty.
Joe howled lustily, and Sylvia yearned to fly to the rescue, but there was something so judicial about Burke's administration of punishment that she did not venture to intervene.
When he came in a little later, she was sitting in their living-room nervously stitching at the sleeve of a shirt that he had managed to tear on some barbed wire. He had his pipe in his hand, and there was an air of grim satisfaction about him that seemed to denote a consciousness of something well done.
Sylvia set her mouth hard and stitched rapidly, trying to forget Joe's piercing yells of a few minutes before. Burke went to the window and stood there, pensively filling his pipe.