“You have come mit der waggons? You make der transport? Not?” he asked us, following up the usual formula.
We told him it was so, and that we were for the fields, and reckoned to reach Matalha by sun-up. He too, he said, was going to the gold-fields, and would be a prospector; he was just waiting for his “boy,” who had gone back for something he had forgotten at the last place. He was going to walk to Moodie’s, he said. He “did make mit one transporter a contract to come by waggons; but it was a woman mit two childs what was leave behind, and dere was no more waggons, so he will walk. It was good to walk to make him strong for de prospect. Oh yes!”
We were used to meeting all sorts on the road, and they were pretty well all inclined to talk; but this one was so full it just bubbled out of him, and in his broken English he got off question on question, between times imparting scraps of information about himself and his hopes. He was clearly in earnest about his future, and he was so utterly unpractical, so hopelessly astray in his view of everything, that one could not but feel kindly towards him. We chatted with him until our waggons came up, when he again politely raised his hat as he said good-bye to us, and offered many thanks for the information about the road. As we moved on with the waggons, he turned to look down the road by which we had come, and said, apparently as an afterthought:
“You haf seen my ‘boy’ perhaps? Not? No! Soh! Good-bye—yes, good-bye!”
It does not take long for daylight to glide through dusk into darkness in the bush veld in South Africa, and even these few minutes spent in conversation had seen the light begin to fade from the sky as the sun disappeared. The road was good and clear of rocks and stumps, so we hopped onto the most comfortable waggon, and talked while the oxen plodded slowly along.
We had quite a large party that trip, for, besides Gowan and myself, who owned the waggons, we had three traders from Swazie country—old friends of ours who had come down to Delagoa to buy goods. We had all arranged to stand in together in a big venture of running loads through Swazieland to the gold-fields later on in the season; in fact, the trip we were then making was more or less a trial one to see how the land lay, and how much we could venture in the big coup.
Gowan, the other transport-rider, and I always travelled together. We were not partners exactly, but in a country like that it was good to have a friend, and we understood each other. There were no two ways about him; he was a white man through and through. The two Mackays were brothers; they had left Scotland some years before to join a farming scheme “suitable for gentlemen’s sons with a little capital,” as the circular and advertisements said. They had given it best, however, and gone trading long before I met them. The other member of our party was the one with whom I had been walking. He was an American, and had been everything and everywhere, most lately a trader in Swazie country. We generally called him the Judge.
As the waggons rumbled along Key was giving a more or less accurate account of our conversation with the stranger.
It was very amusing, even more amusing than the original, for I am bound to say that with him a story did not suffer in the telling. It was only Gowan who didn’t seem to see anything to laugh at in the affair. He sat there dangling his legs over the buck-rails, chewing a long grass stalk, and humming all out of tune. He had a habit of doing that, growling with it. Presently, as conversation flagged, the tune got worse and his growling took the shape of a reference to “giving a poor devil a lift.”
I frankly confessed that I simply had not thought of it, and that was all. As, however, Gowan continued growling about “beastly shame” and “poor devil of a greenhorn,” etc, Key answered dryly.