“I shall come for you later on, my fine Vrouw, and when it is dark I shall know how to manage you. Put away that gun or you may come to the same end as your husband.”
He passed away down to where the canoes lay and held converse with some of the tribesmen there, and there was silence in the camp. But, as Alida felt, the silence was in itself very ominous.
In a little while, as the swift African twilight fell, April, the Basuto, crept up to the waggon and whispered to his mistress. Alida, who for the last half-hour had been very busy with certain preparations in the interior of the waggon, came to the fore-kist, carbine in hand, and listened to him. April with a scared face told her rapidly that things were so wrong that he was going to make a bolt for it and take to the veldt and so try and make Moremi’s town at Lake Ngami. Hans had threatened to shoot him, and he could expect no protection from Ndala. What to advise his mistress he knew not. She asked him if her husband was really dead, and whether she could herself expect aid from Ndala and his people. Alas! April assured her that the Baas had, indeed, been slain, so much he had gleaned from Ndala’s people. As for the chief himself, he had the worst opinion of him, and upon the whole he, April, thought his mistress had better submit herself to the Hottentot. Later on help might come, if he himself could get safely to the Lake.
But April would stay no longer, not even at his mistress’s earnest entreaty, and crept away. A minute later Alida heard the stamp of feet, sounds of a scuffle, and then a blood-curdling scream rang through the growing darkness. More struggling, the sound of thuds, a muttered groan, and then all was silence. Alida, listening with awed white face and nerves at their fullest tension, shuddered and drew back to her child. That was poor April’s death scream beyond a doubt.
She lighted a lantern and then, sitting far back in the waggon, close to her sleeping child, waited for the next scene of this dark tragedy. Who can picture the distress of this poor creature, strong, able-bodied, yet helpless against a cruel destiny. To quit the waggon would be madness. If she attempted to escape with her child into the veldt, a few hours of spooring by the morning light would bring her enemies upon her. Dark and bitter as have been the hours of many a Dutch Afrikander woman in her times of trial, few can have endured the tortures that now racked the soul of Alida Van Zyl. With pale, set face she sat there in mute, yet stubborn, despair, waiting, watching, praying to the God who, it seemed, had now clean forsaken her.
An hour after dark Hans came up to the waggon again.
“Well, Vrouw,” he said, before showing himself, “is it peace?”
“Ay,” returned Alida in a dry voice and with a strange hard look in her face, “it is peace. I am in your hands. You may climb up.”
Hans appeared at the front of the waggon and looked at his mistress. She had no gun in her hand. Apparently all was well. He climbed to the waggon-box and turned to face her. At that moment Alida Van Zyl seized the candle from her open lantern and dropped it into an open cask of gunpowder which stood ready just behind the kartel. The darkness was for one awful moment broken by a blaze of hellish fire; a frightful explosion rocked the earth and rent the air for miles; and in that dire catastrophe Alida Van Zyl, her child, Hans the Hottentot, and half a dozen natives, prying round the waggon to watch the progress of affairs, were, with the waggon itself, blown to a thousand pieces.
Thus miserably ended the last trek of Karel and Alida Van Zyl.