Alida shaded her eyes again, looked keenly down the rude waggon-track that led up to the dwelling, and listened. As she had expected—for she had news of her husband’s coming from the Lake—she presently heard the faint cries of a native; that would be Hans Hottentot, the waggon driver, and then through the still air the full, thick, pistol-like crack of the waggon-whip. At these sounds her somewhat impassive face lightened and she turned into the hut again.
In twenty minutes’ time the waggon had drawn up in front of the dwelling, and Karel Van Zyl, a big, strong Dutchman of seven and twenty, had dismounted from his good grey nag and embraced his wife, who now stood with a face beaming with joy, clasping her two year old child in her arms ready to receive him.
“Zo, Alie,” said Karel, holding his young wife by the shoulders and looking first tenderly at her broad kindly face and then at the yellow-haired child lying in her arms, “here we are at last. It has been a long hunt, but a pretty good one. I left a waggon-load of ivory, rhenoster horns, and hides at Jan Stromboom’s at the Lake and got a good price for them I traded fifty good oxen as well and sold them at 3 pounds 10 shillings a head to Stromboom also, after no end of a haggle. It was worth a day’s bargaining though; the beasts cost me no more than thirty shillings apiece all told.”
Then laying the back of his huge sunburnt hand against the cheek of the sleeping babe, which he had just kissed, he added, “And how is little Jan? Surely the child has grown a foot since I left him?”
Alida smiled contentedly, patted her man’s arm and answered, “Yes, the child has done well since the cool weather came, and he grows every day. He gets as slim (cunning) as a monkey and crawls so that I have to keep a boy to watch him, the little rascal. But kom binnen and have supper. You must be starving.”
Van Zyl gave some orders to his Hottentot man, as to his horse, the trek oxen and some loose cows and calves, and went indoors.
Half an hour later husband and wife came forth again, and, sitting beneath the pleasant starlight, talked of the future. Their coffee stood on a little table in front of them, and Van Zyl, stretching out his long legs and displaying two or three inches of bare ankle above his velschoons—the up-country Boer is seldom guilty of socks—puffed with huge contentment at a big-bowled pipe.
“Karel,” said his wife, after hearing of his last expedition, “I am getting tired of this flat Ngami country, with never a soul to speak to while you are away. When shall we give it up and go back to the Transvaal? I long to see the blue hills again and to hear the voices of friends. Surely you have done well enough these last few years. You can buy and stock a good farm—6,000 morgen at least. (A morgen is rather more than two acres.) And you told me when we married—now three years agone, Karel,”—she laid her hand upon his as she spoke, “that you did not mean to spend all your life, like your father, in the hunting veldt.”
“No, Alie, I don’t,” rejoined Van Zyl, taking his wife’s hand into his two and pressing it tenderly. “You shall go back to the Transvaal, my lass, and we will buy a farm in Rustenburg and live comfortably and go to Nachtmaal (Communion) once a quarter. And if I do want a hunt now and again, why I’ll cross the Crocodile River and try the Nuanetsi and Sabi River veldt, where Roelof Van Staden and his friends travel to. But we must have one more trek together, Alie, and this time you and the child shall go with me. Coming to the Lake, on my way home from this last hunt, I met messengers from Ndala, captain of a tribe far up the Okavango, who asks me to take my waggon up to his kraal and hunt elephants in his country. He promises me the half of all ivory shot, and will find spoorers and show me his best veldt and give me every help. Twice before has Ndala sent to me thus, and once to my father in years gone by. I believe it is a splendid hunting veldt. Elephants as thick as pallah in river bush, thousands of buffalo, plenty of rhenoster and lots of other game. We ought, with luck, to pick up four hundred pounds worth of ivory. And so, wife, we’ll pack the waggon, get more powder and cartridges at the Lake and trek up to Ndala’s.”
“And this shall be your last trek in this country, Karel?” asked his wife.