Considine smiled, but, seeing that the Hottentot did not choose to be communicative on the point, he forbore further question.
“What a funny man Jerry Goldboy is!” said Jessie McTavish, as she sat that same evening sipping a pannikin of tea in her father’s tent.
From the opening of the tent the fire was visible.
Jerry was busy preparing his supper, while he kept up an incessant run of small-chat with Booby and Jemalee. The latter replied to him chiefly with grave smiles, the former with shouts of appreciative laughter.
“He is funny,” asserted Mrs McTavish, “and uncommonly noisy. I doubt if there is much good in him.”
“More than you think, Mopsy,” said Kenneth (by this irreverent name did the Highlander call his better-half); “Jerry Goldboy is a small package, but he’s made of good stuff, depend upon it. No doubt he’s a little nervous, but I’ve observed that his nerves are tried more by the suddenness with which he may be surprised than by the actual danger he may chance to encounter. On our first night out, when he roused the camp and smashed the stock of his blunderbuss, no doubt I as well as others thought he showed the white feather, but there was no lack of courage in him when he went last week straight under the tree where the tiger was growling, and shot it so dead that when it fell it was not far from his feet.”
“I heard some of the men, papa,” observed Jessie, “say that it was Dutch courage that made him do that. What did they mean by Dutch courage?”
Jessie, being little more than eight, was ignorant of much of the world’s slang.
“Cape-smoke, my dear,” answered her father, with a laugh.
“Cape-smoke?” exclaimed Jessie, “what is that?”