“Your name?” he asked in chaff, rather than that he doubted it.
“My name, yea Soltké—Adolf Soltké—coom from Germany, but in der colonie I was leetle times.”
“Took you for Amurrikan,” said the Judge, without a vestige of a smile.
I looked hastily at Soltké, feeling that his broken, halting English should have protected him from such outrageous fooling, but my solicitude was misplaced. Soltké calmly, but firmly, disclaimed all knowledge of America, and repeated that he was a German.
Key shouldered the portmanteau with the curt suggestion, “Waal, let’s git!” and as our friend—except by his protestations of gratitude and wild endeavours to carry the whole of the kit himself—offered no hindrance to the proposed scheme, we marched along briskly to overtake the waggons.
A bullock-waggon is a slow one to travel with, but a bad one to catch, as anyone knows who has tried it; and it was close on midnight when, tired and dusty, we came suddenly on the waggons outspanned in a small opening in the Bush.
The silence was absolutely ghostly, except when now and then a bullock would give a big long sigh, or a sappy stick in the fire would crack and hiss.
Gowan was sitting over the fire on a three-legged rough-wood stool, head in hands and elbows on knees, with the odd jets of flame lighting up his solemn old face and shaggy brown beard. The others had turned in. He stood up slowly as we came up and extended a hand to Soltké, saying baldly:
“How are ye?”
Our friend took the inquiry in a literal sense, and was engaged in answering it, when Gowan cut in with a remark that it was “time to be in bed,” and, accepting his own hint, he hooked his finger in the “reimpje” of his camp-stool and strolled off to where his blankets were already spread under one of the waggons.