“No, mevrouw,” he said, lowering the gun again, “you can sjambok me, but I can’t fire. If I hit her, it’s murder, and I daren’t do it.”
Speechless almost with rage, the woman struck him in the face with her hand.
“You dog,” she shouted. “By the Almighty, you shall suffer for this.”
Meanwhile May Felton was speeding along over the eighteen miles of veldt road that led her to Vryburg and comparative safety. (It was before Vryburg had been surrendered.) She galloped it in one piece, and, thanks to her good pony, compassed the distance in rather more than two hours, having ridden close on fifty miles since dawn.
Arrived at Vryburg, she delivered her dispatch, together with the captured rifle and cartridges, to the resident magistrate, receiving his hearty congratulations in return. Next day, accompanied by the doctor, and a couple of policemen, she started for home again. Making a long détour, and avoiding Monjana Mabeli, they reached her father’s homestead just at sunset.
Chapter Twelve.
A Transvaal Morning.
They were sitting by a big camp fire, close to the junction of the Marico and Crocodile Rivers—on the Bechuanaland side, where the old trade road to the interior runs—a motley and yet very interesting gathering of hunters, transport riders, and traders, and as usual they had been yarning. It was nearing Christmas, 1891; the weather was waxing very hot, and the night was so warm that even the oldest man of the party, “old John Blakeman,” easily to be recognised by his white head and grizzled beard, sat in his flannel shirt, without a coat, his sleeves rolled up, his brawny, sunburnt arms folded across his chest. The night was very still; scarcely an air of wind stirred; occasionally a kiewitje plover uttered its mournful, chiding cry; the not unmusical croak of frogs was heard, bubbling softly from a swamp a little way off; these, with an occasional cough from the trek oxen, as they lay peacefully at their yokes, were the only sounds that here broke the outer silence of the veldt. Tales of adventure are a never failing source of interest at these fireside gatherings, and a number of hunting stories, more or less well-founded, had been trotted out. A somewhat assertive up-country trader, lately returned from the Ngami region, had just finished a highly-coloured narrative, in which a couple of lions had been easily vanquished. According to his theory these great carnivora are as readily bagged as wild duck at a vlei.
“That’s all very well,” rejoined old John Blakeman, taking his pipe from his mouth and a pull at his beaker of whiskey and water. “You may have had a stroke of luck, Heyford, and killed a brace of ’em without much trouble or danger, but in my judgment lions are not to be played with. A hungry lion, and more especially a starved, worn-out old ‘mannikie,’ who can’t kill his natural food properly, is, on a dark, stormy night, the most dangerous, cruel, and persistent beast in Africa—the very devil incarnate. Guns and gunners have a good deal tamed the extraordinary boldness of lions in the last thirty years. I can remember the time when they killed cattle, ay, and even Kaffirs, in this very country where you now sit, in open daylight. Why! Katrina Visser, wife of a Marico Boer, lost her child, a lad of six years old, by a lion, in broad daylight, killed at four o’clock in the afternoon, within fifty yards of her door. That happened four and thirty years ago, in 1857, in the Marico country, within less than sixty miles of this very outspan. I remember it but too well. The following morning, which happened to be Easter Day, was one of the saddest and at the same time the most exciting I ever experienced.”
“Tell us the yarn, John,” clamoured a number of voices together. “Yours are always worth listening to.”
“Well, lads,” went on the stout old fellow, filling his pipe and relighting it with much care and deliberation from a smouldering ember, “it’s a long story, but I’ll cut it as short as possible. It happened in this way. I began trading up here in the early fifties. In those days, as you know, and a good deal later, it was a long and serious business, and each trip always spoilt a year. We used to trek up through Natal, climb the Drakensberg, then cross the Free State plains—there was plenty of game there in those days—and, looking in at Mooi River Dorp—Potchefstrom, as we call it now—pass on through Marico. I hunted as well as traded in those days and knew very well all the Marico Boers, with some of whom I sometimes joined forces. They were a rough but very hospitable lot of fellows, and some of them—Jan Viljoen, Marthinus Swartz, Frans Joubert, and others—some of the finest shots and pluckiest hunters in the world. I hunted elephants towards the Lake for two seasons with Gerrit Visser, husband of Katrina, the woman I’m going to tell you about. They lived in a rough ‘hartebeest house’ of wattle and reeds in a magnificent kloof on a tributary of the Marico. Well, in ’57, Gerrit and I met, as we had arranged, at one of the farmhouses near the Barolong border, prepared for a big trip towards the Tamalakan River.