Tom looked about him with interest. As far as he could see, extended row on row of coffee plants in straight lines about six feet apart. Between them, at the same interval, were dug shallow pits some eighteen inches deep. He had arrived just at the time when the fruit was ripe, and a number of negroes were busily picking it from the bushes. Here and there among them stood tall Arab overseers, all armed with whips.
Presently the party came to a couple of machines resembling cider presses, which Reinecke explained were pulpers for separating the beans from the reddish pulp that covered them. Then they passed two large brick vats, in one of which the beans were fermented, in the other washed and dried. Beyond these were sheds where the coffee, now ready for market, was stored and packed. And then, in a separate clearing, laid out like a European garden, they came to Reinecke's bungalow, a brightly painted structure of wood, with a long verandah and a thatched roof. A table was laid on the verandah, and a few minutes after his arrival Tom was seated with his host and his fellow-guest at a meal, prepared and served by native servants, which reminded him, with a difference, of the meals he had known the year before, when his father had sent him to Germany.
Finding that Tom understood German, Reinecke conversed in that language, dropping into English now and then to explain technical terms. He related to his interested guests the story of the plantation: how the land was first cleared by cutting down the timber and uprooting the bush: how this was burnt and the ashes mixed with the soil: the months of hoeing: the sowings in the seed beds: the planting out of the seedlings in November, when the rains began: and the tedious three years' waiting before the young plants started to bear. Those three years he had utilised by planting a thorn fence about the whole clearing of some hundreds of acres. Tom supposed that this fence had been erected to keep out wild beasts, for depredations by human marauders were not to be feared in a district where German authority was established. Reinecke assented; but Tom was to discover before many days were past that the fence had another, even a sinister purpose.
The next two days were spent very agreeably in shooting expeditions into the wild country beyond the plantation. Captain Goltermann turned out to be a crack shot, and the greater number of the antelopes and buffaloes which the sportsmen brought down fell to his gun. Tom was all anxiety to get a shot at a lion or even an elephant, which Reinecke told him were to be found in parts of the Plateau; but the Germans were indisposed to take the long journeys that were necessary to reach the habitats of these more dangerous game: Goltermann's visit was to be only a short one.
One trifling incident of these days was to have an important bearing on Tom's fortunes. Captain Goltermann had shot an antelope, but, with less than his usual skill or luck, had only wounded it. Determined not to lose his prey, he followed, accompanied by the others, over a stretch of hilly country, dotted with bush, tracking the animal by its blood-stains into a deep nullah through which a stream flowed. The sportsmen caught sight of it at last, drinking at the border of a lake, the source of the stream. Goltermann had just raised his gun to give the coup de grâce when the antelope suddenly sank into the water and appeared no more.
"We have provided a meal for a crocodile," said the captain with a shrug. "The slimy sneaking reptile!"
"It was bad luck for you, Goltermann," said Reinecke. "The beast was hopelessly trapped; there's no exit from this end of the nullah. Our long tramp for nothing!"
Naturally, it was not until the captain had left that Tom broached the business that had brought him from England.
"Now that we have come into my father's property," he said on the third morning at breakfast, "my brother and I thought it just as well that I should take a trip out and see things on the spot. He explained that in his letter."
"Naturally," said Reinecke. "It is what I should have done myself."