There was a story toward, and no one moved.
“There were many Kafirs on his farm, which you have not seen,” pursued the Vrouw Grobelaar, adjusting her voice to narrative pitch. “It was on the fringe of the Drakensberg, and many spurs of hill, divided by deep kloofs like gashes, descended on to it. So plenty of water came down, and the cattle were held from straying by the rocks, on one side at any rate. The Kafirs had their kraals dotted all about the land; and as they were of the kind that work, my stepsister’s husband suffered them to remain and grow their little patches of mealies, while they worked for him in between. He was, of course, a cattle Boer, as all of our family have always been, but here were so many Kafirs to be had for nothing that he soon commenced to plow great spaces of land and sow valuable crops. There was every prospect that we would make very much money out of that farm; for corn always sells, even when cattle are going for only seven pounds apiece, and Shadrach van Guelder was very cheerful about it.
“But when a farmer weighs an ungrown crop, you will always find that there is something or other he does not take into account. He tells off the weather and the land and the Kafirs and the water on his fingers, and forgets to bend down his thumb to represent God—or something. Shadrach van Guelder lifted up his eyes to the hills from whence came the water, but it was not until the green corn was six inches high that he saw that there came with it baboons—armies and republics of them; more baboons than he had thought to exist. They swooped down on his sprouting lands, and rioted, ate, and rooted, trampled and wantoned, with that kind of bouncing devilishness that not even a Kafir can correctly imitate. In one night they undid all his work on five sown morgen of fat land, and with the first wink of the sun in the east they were back again in their kopjes, leaving devastation and foulness wherever they passed.
“It was my stepsister’s husband that stood on one leg and cursed like a Jew. He was wrathful as a Hollander that has been drinking water, and what did not help to make him content was the fact that hardly anything would avail to protect his lands. Once the baboons had tasted the sweetness of the young corn, they would come again and again, camping in the kloofs overhead as long as anything remained for them, like a deaf guest. But, for all that, he had no notion of leaving them to plunder at their ease. The least one can do with an unwelcome visitor is to make him uncomfortable; and he sent to certain kraals on the farm for two old Kafirs he had remarked who had the appearance of cunning old men.
“They came and squatted before him, squirming and shuffling, as Kafirs do when a white man talks to them. One was quite a common kind of Kafir, gone a little gray with age, a tuft of white wool on his chin and little patches of it here and there on his head. But the other was a small, twisted, yellow man, with no hair at all, and eyes like little blots of fire on a charred stick; and his arms were so long and gnarled and lean that he had a bestial look, like a laborious animal.
“‘The baboons have killed the crop on the lower lands,’ said Shadrach, smacking his leg with his sjambok. ‘If they are not checked, they will destroy all the corn on this farm. What is the way to go about it?’
“The little yellow man was biting his lips and turning a straw in his hands, and gave no answer; but the other spoke.
“‘I am from Shangaanland,’ he said, ‘and there, when the baboons plague us, we have a way with them, a good way.’
“He sneered sideways at his yellow companion as he spoke, and the look which the latter returned to him was a thing to shrink from.
“‘What is this way?’ demanded Shadrach.