“Baas Joe go die,” reiterated the woman.
“Hold your tongue!” roared Dyke angrily. “You understand what I mean. Jack is to go back.—Do you hear, Jack? Go back, and take that to Morgenstern’s.”
The Kaffir and his wife stared at him heavily, with their lower jaws dropped, and after several more efforts, Dyke turned back to the house to continue his ministrations.
“They understand me, both of them,” he cried bitterly; “but he does not want to go, and Tant wants him to stay. What shall I do? What shall I do?”
He changed the handkerchiefs, and rushed out again, but the Kaffirs were invisible; and going round to the back, he found Jack squatted on his heels, eating the hot cake his wife was baking. But though Dyke tried command and entreaty, the pair only listened to him in a dazed kind of way, and it was quite evident that unless he tried violence he would not be able to make the Kaffir stir; while even if he did use force, he felt that Jack would only go a short distance and there remain.
“And I can’t leave here! I can’t leave here!” groaned Dyke; “it would be like saying good-bye to poor Joe for ever.”
Clinging to the faint hope that after he had been well-fed and rested, the Kaffir might be made to fulfil the duty required of him, Dyke went on tending his brother, with the satisfactory result of seeing him drop at last into a troubled sleep, from which, two hours after, he started up to call out for Dyke.
“I’m here, Joe, old chap. Can’t you see me?” said the boy piteously.
“No use: tell him no use. Madness to come. All are dying. Poor Dyke! So hard—so hard.”
Dyke felt his breast swell with emotion, and then came a fresh horror: the evening was drawing on, and he would be alone there with the sick man, watching through the darkness, and ignorant of how to act—what to do. And now the thought of his position, alone there in the great desert, seemed more than he could bear; the loneliness so terrible, that once more, in the midst of the stifling heat, he shuddered and turned cold.