There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout, except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of the little kopje located the spot.
"A veld hotel in the Orange Free State—a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the grass country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein."
He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead woman who lay under the blossoming irises at his feet. He saw her with the mental vision quite clearly. Her great purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their superior level, and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret defiance, and indomitable in the determination of their regard.
Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail? Why had she distrusted him?
He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender, shrinking figure, woman's and yet child's, and held out the little slate to her, and said, with the smile that even backward children could not resist:
"Did you draw this?"
She nodded, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up at him from under their sweeping black lashes. He went on, pointing with a slender grass-blade to each object as he named it:
"It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this is an orchard, and here the Kaffirs live. But who lives in the house?"
She whispered, with a look of secret fear: