“If you would excuse my curiosity, sir,” said Hardy after a while, “I should like to know what brought you into these parts. You are, I think you said, an Englishman. But—”
“But I don’t look as though I had lived in England,—that is what you mean, I think? Well, I’ll tell you my history. It illustrates what we were talking of at dinner,—as to what is the truth respecting the treatment of the natives by the Boers. My father and mother were English. They came out to the Cape Colony somewhere about 1830, and they settled on a farm in Namaqualand. It didn’t pay. Their cattle were continually driven off by the bushmen, and their fruit plundered and their guns and hoes and the like stolen by the Hottentots. Nothing they could do would prevent it. The native servants were often as not in league with the thieves. Every now and then they would run off and take anything of value with them.”
“As for the cattle-stealing,” remarked George, “that is an old story. A man must be a good deal wiser than I am who can say how it is to be prevented. But I wonder, I must say, if you treated the Hottentots well, as I have no doubt you did, that they didn’t stay with you.”
“Perhaps they might,” said Prestcott, which they afterwards found to be their host’s name,—“perhaps they might, if they had been left to themselves. But there were always a lot of Hottentots going loose about the country; and they threatened our servants with their vengeance if they didn’t give them food and drink. They didn’t dare refuse, and then they expected to be severely punished, and ran off. Anyhow, they couldn’t keep any servants, and their property was continually pillaged. They must have left the country if they had lived. But one day my father was speared by a party of bushmen, whom he had caught driving off a bull. My mother, who had seen the transaction, ran screaming out, and they speared her too. They then entered and pillaged the house. I was a child of eight years old, and they no doubt would have killed me along with my parents, if it hadn’t occurred to them that old Potgieter, a Boer farmer a few miles off, would give them something handsome for me. They took me to him, and he did buy me.”
“You don’t mean that he bought you of them, knowing how they had come by you?” exclaimed Redgy, horror-stricken.
“No, sir. They were too clever to tell him that, and he was too clever to ask. They merely said they had found me, and they believed my father and mother were dead.”
“And they had excellent reasons for believing so,” remarked Redgy.
“True, sir. Well, old Herman Potgieter took pity on me, as he was pleased to express it. He took me over to the field-cornet’s house, and apprenticed me, after their fashion, to himself, until I should be one-and-twenty years old.”
“Ay, I have heard of that before I left England,” remarked Margetts. “But I thought the age was five-and-twenty, and it was further remarked that it was astonishing how long these apprentices are in reaching their five-and-twentieth year.”
“Just so, sir. The natives seldom know how old they are; indeed, they are seldom able to keep any account of time; and they are obliged to prove that they are five-and-twenty before they can claim their freedom. I have known a native kept in service until he was nearly forty. But though I was not nine years old before I was taken before the field-cornet, I knew something of their ways, having heard my father talk about it. I produced a Prayer-Book he had given me on my eighth birthday, insisting upon it that in a little more than twelve years’ time I should be free. I suppose when they found out I was really an English boy, on my father’s side at all events, they were a little frightened, and thought it best to be cautious.”