Chapter Two.
Soltké.
An Incident of the Delagoa Road.
We were transport-riders trekking with loads from Delagoa Bay to Lydenburg, trekking slowly through the hot, bushy, low veld, doing our fifteen to twenty miles a day. The roads were good and the rates were high, and we were happy.
Towards sundown two of us strolled on ahead, taking the guns in hopes of picking up a guinea-fowl, or a stembuck, or some other small game, leaving the waggons to follow as soon as the cattle were inspanned. We shot nothing; in fact, we saw nothing to shoot. It was swelteringly hot, as it always is there until the red sun goes down and all things get a chance to cool. It was also very dusty—two or three inches of powdery dust under our feet, which whipped up in little swirls at the least breath of air. I was keeping an eye on the scrub on my side for the chance of a bush pheasant, and not taking much notice of the road, when my companion pulled up with a half-suppressed exclamation, and stood staring hard at something on ahead.
“Dern my skin!” said he slowly and softly, as I came up to him. He was a slow-spoken Yankee. “Say, look there! Don’t it beat hell?”
In the direction indicated, partly hidden by the scant foliage of a thorn-tree, a man was sitting on a yellow portmanteau reading a book. The sight was unusual, and it brought the unemotional Yankee to a standstill and set us both smiling. The man was dressed in a sort of clerk’s everyday get-up, even to the bowler hat, and as he sat there he held overhead an old black silk umbrella to protect him from such of the sun’s rays as penetrated the thorn-bush. He must have become conscious of the presence of life by the subtle instinct which we all know and can’t explain, for almost immediately he raised his glance and looked us straight in the eyes. He rose and came towards us, laying aside the umbrella, but keeping his place in the book.
The scene was too ludicrous not to provoke a smile, and the young fellow—he could not have been above twenty-three—mistaking its import, raised his hat politely and wished us “good-afternoon.”
He spoke English, but with a strong German accent, and his dress, his open manner, his ready smiles, and, above all, his politeness, proclaimed him very much a stranger to those parts. Key murmured a line from a compatriot: “Green peas has come to market, and vegetables is riz.”