"It was their plan, you see, that she should fire off her gun and then be taken before she had time to recharge it.
"'Have you got the woman, Martinus?' called a Kafir from outside.
"'No,' cried the Vrouw Coetzee; Martinus has not got the woman, for I have killed him. Who comes next?'
"There was a while of silence then, till she heard them moving about again and talking among themselves. Not daring to think what they would do next, she stood hearkening, with the great gun on her arm. At length came a sound that froze the blood in her body. She heard the sheet-iron on the roof grate as it was dragged off. Then she dropped the gun at her feet and knew that her time was come.
"I cannot tell you in so many words what she did in the next minutes, for my tongue refuses the tale. But the Kafirs did not get into the house. By this time the news of their doings was gone abroad, and as the roof was being taken off the house, some Burghers arrived with guns, and with them my husband. Of course they shot most of the Kafirs that they could find, and then, being unable to get any answer to their shouts, they broke in the door of the house and entered.
"My husband used to weep as he told of what they found. The Vrouw Coetzee was sitting in a chair, smiling with her eyes closed, and her baby was lying in the crutch of her left arm. Her right hand was on his little soft throat—his face blue and swollen, and his little arms stretched out with tight closed fists. He was quite dead, but warm yet, for he had missed life by but a few minutes.
"No, the Vrouw Coetzee was not dead. She died a year after; but all that while she went witless, always smiling and seeming to look for something.
"So you see that, after all, a Kafir is—Katje, what are you crying about?"
PIET NAUDE'S TREK
On Sunday afternoons the Vrouw Grobelaar's household gave itself up, unwillingly enough, to religious exercises. The girls retired to their rooms in company with the works of certain well-meaning but inexpressibly dreary authors, and it is to be inferred they read them with profit. The children sat around the big room with Bibles, their task being to learn by heart one of the eight-verse articulations of the 119th Psalm, while the old lady meditated in her armchair and maintained discipline. Those were stern times for the young students: to fidget in one's seat was to court calamity; even to scratch oneself was a risky experiment. David got little credit as a bard in that assembly.