'I am afraid so,' she assented.
Something struck him. That soldier-farmer in the quiet front room—who was to bury him? who dig his grave?
'If I had thought,' he said, 'I would have done it myself the—the grave, you know—instead of having breakfast. You girls cannot do it. Is the old man strong enough? I would do it now, but my time is not my own.' He looked at his watch.
'I have sent the three little boys to Du Toit's farm,' she said, 'five miles away, to ask them to send two of their Kaffir boys down. All of ours have gone off.'
He shook hands with her when he was going, thanked her for all she had done.
'It is nothing,' she said; 'we have to thank you, yet we don't, you notice. It is war-time. Good-bye.'
The grey air freshened as the sun climbed foot by foot up over the great kop to the east. The night's storm had left the veldt fragrant as our own bush after rain. The deserted farms looked at him, a mist of sleep and forgetfulness in their eyes. Those every-day fences, those gates made for farmers to pass through, farmers' daughters to lean on watching for their lovers, farmers' children to swing on—was it possible half a dozen regiments had gone crashing through and over them, hastening to headquarters only a week before?
Mortimer looked at the healthy land with a bushman's appreciative eyes. He wondered now many sheep the farms held. A Boer prisoner at the camp had told him the country carried a sheep to six acres, an ostrich to twelve, and a horse to twenty. He speculated loosely on the chances there would be for an army of drought-ruined Australian settlers to come here after the war with modern implements and knowledge, and astonish these pastoralists, who were a century at least behind Europe in the way of agriculture.
'Even Cameron's ahead of them,' Mortimer thought, his mind reverting sadly to the poor little selection at Wilgandra that bounded Hermie's life.
A heavy waggon went past drawn by a span of mules, and driven by a Kaffir, who cracked a whip of such length that the ordinary stockwhip was nowhere beside it.