"What in the world brings you out here? Why, you were quite a youngster when I left the old school to enter Sandhurst two years ago, and now you are nearly as tall as I am!"
"I have been out here six months."
"What have you been doing?"
"I have been at a farm up-country belonging to a cousin of my father. As to what I have been doing, I can only say I have been riding, and shooting, and learning to speak Dutch."
"And have you learnt to speak it?"
"Yes, I can speak it well enough to pass as a Boer in a short conversation."
"Well, come and sit down in the garden behind the hotel and tell me all about it. I suppose you are wanting to get up to the front—wherever that may be—and as I came out with a good many men who will be employed in organizing and transport, and other jobs of the sort, I may be able to help you, if I know something about what you have been doing out here."
Yorke told his old school-fellow why he had left Rugby and come out, his life at the farm, and the events which had led to his leaving it suddenly.
"You have done awfully well," Parkinson said when Yorke had finished his story, "and you deserve to get on. Anyhow, if I can help you, I will."
Three weeks passed quietly; as yet nothing was settled. Kruger's replies to Mr. Chamberlain's despatches were more and more unsatisfactory; still, the general feeling at the Cape was that he would back down at the last moment and grant the terms of suffrage for which the colonial secretary was pressing. The refugees from Johannesburg were not of this opinion. "We believe he means to fight," said one of a group gathered in the billiard-room, "and I hope with all my heart that he will now do so. What does it matter to us whether he gives the suffrage to men after a five years' or seven years' residence. In the first place, he has always broken his engagements, and if he were to agree to a five years' suffrage, he would devise some means for cheating us out of it afterwards; besides, not one in twenty of the Uitlanders would take the trouble to claim it. In the first place, they would know that the members they might return for the few towns where they are in a majority would be swamped by the representatives of the country districts; and in the next place, they know that if they took the oath to the Transvaal Government, they would forfeit the right of complaining to England of any ill-treatment, and, whatever their position, might be commandeered and sent off to fight Swazis, or any other savages, at a moment's notice. No, no; the thing is begun now, and it had best be carried through, whatever it costs. It will have to be settled some day or other, and the sooner the better."