"Eh?" The elder man doubted if he heard aright.
Klein Piet seemed to be in a dream. "I only know," he said, in the same slow manner of speech, "that this place I stand on is like a birthplace to me. I must have dreamed of it when I was a child."
The younger boys were watching the pair of them in wonder. Piet put out his hand to his son.
"Then we shall not quarrel," he said. "I cannot say what it is, the finger of God stirring or the lusts of the flesh, but the same thing has hold of me, Klein Piet. I am fallen at the same dyke; I could not leave this place if I would."
Only Susanna was not completely at her ease. Piet found no matter for surprise in this, but looked to see a change when the house should be built and the offices of home-keeping should have set up landmarks in her life. A Boer woman should live between her kitchen and her bed, he was used to say, and he held to this unswervingly even when the kitchen was but the cheek of a wood-fire in the veld and the bed the windy sail of a wagon. So when her face showed that the strangeness of the place did not abate for her, when she shrank from being alone and shivered at the on-coming of the nights that strode in from the sea, he only smiled on her and was careful to be close to her, and was glad, with a mild satisfaction, that the long trek and the fights and the sorrows had left her womanly and soft. She was a De Villiers from the western edge of the Karoo, fair and still as all the women of that stock are; but it never happened to him to think of the dead men and women who had gone to the making of her family, soldiers and gospellers and martyrs, but never a sailor among them. Neither did it happen that he took any account of his kafirs, for Piet was sound Boer to the bone; or he might have seen that they, too, had their fears and misgivings. The black man's solitude is peopled with ghosts and devils; beyond the ring of his firelight, the dark is uneasy with presences; and it was not fear of the Zulus alone that kept these tremblers close about the camp, and cowed them to an anxious obedience the sjambok could never have commanded.
Indeed, there was no time for Piet and his sons to become infected with doubts, for they set to work at once on the building of their house. The stone thereabouts lay over the face of the land in rounded boulders and splintered cleanly under the sledge-hammer. The house they devised to face the sea was to be of stone from eaves to the foot of the walls and rooted well in the ground. Piet marked it all out with little gutters, and, since he himself was the strongest of them, he set the lads to dig a firm foundation with half the kafirs, while he took the other half to split and carry stone. They had all a good will to work; their task was to justify to themselves their choice of a home, and the skinny kafirs had to bend their naked backs freely to keep pace with the eager work of their masters. The thud of the picks and the ring of Piet's great hammer made a loud answer to the ceaseless murmur and rustle of the sea on the sand; even Susanna was stirred from her cares by the briskness of the work.
The place where Piet labored at the stone was under the bank of the stream, where it ran deep and slow, and curved curiously between little hard headlands of rock and easy bosoms of sand; so that when he was plying the great sledge and cutting out the stone in big, flat cakes, he was hidden from the lads who dug on the foundations of the house, a couple of hundred paces away. There was little enough to fear now, but his old lore of war still governed him, and he carried his rifle to his work with him, and had chosen to work in a spot where he could not be suddenly approached by one coming secretly through the hummocks. Here, at noon, on the fourth or fifth day of the building, he was laboring happily. His was the part to swing the great sledge on the wedges; three, four full-bodied blows, each ringing true as a bell on the iron wedges, and a fat, flat slice of stone jarred loose from the body of the rock, to be hauled apart by the kafirs; and then in with the wedges again. He had joy in his strength, and in the pretty skill of never missing the head of the wedge; so that he worked on without fatigue and did not look about him. It was when another big flake of stone was broken away, that an exclamation from one of the kafirs made him turn sharply to look up-stream.
He was never sure what manner of man he saw, watching him from the far side of the spruit. For one thing, there was sweat in his eyes; for another, he turned to grasp his rifle, and when he turned back, the man was gone. But in the couple of moments that the man was in view, Piet saw that he was white, a short, strongly-built white man, dark against the pale sand. And though he could never find a phrase for the impression in his mind, the thing that puzzled him was the utter strangeness of the man's appearance. Whether it was the fashion of his clothes, his attitude, his looks, or just the mere whole of him, he could never explain. But, "it seemed to me as if he were none of God's making," he always added.
It was a matter of no more than a couple of breaths; then his bewilderment broke up, and caution took its place. He bustled his kafirs together and shepherded them out of the streambed and back to the camp, coming last with his rifle cocked in the crook of his arm to guard against any possible danger. He saw that work had ceased in the foundations of the house; the lads and the kafirs were gathered in a knot in the pit, and their voices buzzed in talk. But he gave no notice to that.
"We are being watched," he said to them. "Back to the laager and get your guns."