It was on a Sunday morning that we came in sight of Pretorius Kop—a solitary sugar-loaf hill—and we lay by as usual during the hours of daylight. We knew it was Sunday, because Soltké had said so, and because we saw him in the early morning kneeling in the shadow of a big tree a few yards from the waggons, Prayer-book in hand, absorbedly following the prayers of the Mass. He was a Roman Catholic, and was as uncompromisingly particular in observing the smallest detail of his Church’s ritual and teaching as he was by nature tolerant of the shortcomings of others. In the course of the morning’s short excursion Soltké had come across one of those crawling creatures known to children as “thousand-legs,” the common, harmless millipede. It was the first he had ever seen, and words failed him in his quest for information. Key was the first he met on his return, and the Judge told him solemnly that the insect in question was “that well-known and most ferocious of reptiles, the viper.” During breakfast Soltké absorbed whole volumes of information about this “wiper”—its habits and uses, and as soon as the meal was over he betook himself to the side-pocket of the tent waggon, where the beloved diary was kept, and commenced to write up the new discovery. We were all spread about enjoying the morning smoke, or taking it easy in other ways. We had forgotten Soltké, but presently his face popped out, wearing a most worried, earnest, and intense expression.
“Joodge!” he called, “Joodge, how vos dot wiper shpell?”
Key dictated calmly:
“W-h-y-p-e-r, whyper,” and Soltké with infinite pains put it down. But we heard him a moment later from his place in the tent of the waggon murmuring:
“Lieber Himmel! dot vos un oogly name.” He kept his diary in English, and many a perspiring hour did he spend in his struggles with our language; but he never quailed once, never even slackened, for he said it was “goot to make him friends mit der English, and he can talk him when he shall coom on der prospect.”
Soltké could hardly have taken down the name of this new wonder, when the sight of a blue jay flying past—one marvellous blaze of gorgeous colour as its shiny feathers caught the sunlight—sent him into a perfect paroxysm of excitement. He had seen the honeysuckers, and knew them in the diary as “birds of Paradise;” he knew the ordinary or cockyolly bird as the small “pheasant of Capricorn”; he had shot dicky-birds by the dozen and stuffed them, and their noxious odours seemed to add zest to his ornithological pursuits; but he had never seen, never dreamed of, anything like this. For one spellbound moment Soltké watched the bird sail by, and then gasped out:
“Gott in Himmel! what woss dat? Christnacht, be shtill, und I shot him.”
Diary, pen, ink and blotter were thrust aside, and Soltké scrambled for the gun. We turned our backs on him to watch the bird. Soltké jumped from the waggon. The report of the two barrels was so loud and close that it made us duck; but the blue jay sat unmoved.
There was a curious silence that made several of us look round together. The gun had fallen, and Soltké was standing above it, rigid and ghastly white, with one hand gripping a burnt and blood-spattered tear in his right leg. As we sprang to him open-armed he seemed just to sway gently towards us with closed eyes and a soft murmur of words in his own tongue. It sounded like a prayer.
I think he fainted then; but we were never sure, as he was always so still with it all that one couldn’t tell at times whether he was dead or alive. The medicines we had, and the remedies we knew, did not run to gunshot wounds and broken legs, but we made shift to fix him up somehow with a rough ligament.