“Let me go alone,” Ralph was saying.
“Nay,” Jan answered, “I will accompany you, for two are better than one; also I shall not sleep till I find out the truth and know whether Suzanne lives or is dead.”
“Indeed! and what is to become of me?” I asked.
“You, vrouw, can stop with the neighbours here, and we will join you in Natal.”
“You will do no such thing, Jan Botmar,” I answered, “for where you two go there I can go. What! Am I not sick also with love for my daughter and anxious to learn her fate?”
“As you will, wife,” answered Jan; “perhaps it is well that we three should not separate who have been together always,” and he went to see about the waggon.
As soon as the moon rose, which was about eleven o’clock, the oxen were inspanned. Before we started, however, several of our friends came praying us not to venture on so perilous a journey; indeed, they threatened even to use force to prevent us, and I think would have done so had not Jan told them outright that we were our own masters and free to go where we wished. So they departed, grieving over our obstinacy, and little guessing that their danger was far greater than our own, since as it chanced just as they had trekked through the Van Reenen’s Pass a few days later a Zulu impi, returning from the Weenen massacres, fell upon them unawares and killed more than half their number before they were beaten off.
So we trekked with the moon, Gaasha guiding us, and did not outspan till dawn. As I have said, we had no horses, but never until I made that journey did it come home to me how slow are oxen, for never before then was I in a hurry, nor, indeed, have I been since that time. It is the Englishmen who are always in a hurry, and that is one of the reasons why we Boers are so superior to them, and when we choose can master them in everything, except shopkeeping, and especially in fighting. Well, at the best the cattle could not drag the waggon over the roadless veldt at a greater rate than two miles an hour, or cover more than twenty miles a day in all. It was pitiful to see Ralph’s impatience; again and again he walked on and returned; indeed, had we allowed it, I think that he would have pressed forward on foot, leaving us to follow in the waggon.
At daylight on the third day we inspanned as usual, and trekked through the morning mists until the sun sucked them up. Then Gaasha, who was sitting on the waggon-box beside Ralph, touched his shoulder, and pointed before him. Ralph looked, and far away upon the plain saw what seemed to be a white cloud, above which towered the flat cliffs of a mountain of red rock.
“See, Baas,” he said, “yonder is Umpondwana, my home, and now by nightfall I shall know whether my parents are still alive, or, if they are dead, whether they have left any cattle that I can claim by law,” and he began to whistle cheerfully.