"As sure as death," he said, "I saw the pit swarming with men like birds over a wheatfield. And you?"
"I saw it too," answered Klein Piet. "And the men with the hammers—they were naked to the waist and hairy like baboons."
They stared at each other stupidly, half-aghast at the knowledge they shared. Their faces, in the firelight, were white and hard.
"Have we trekked too far?" said Piet, almost in a whisper. "Can a man trek to hell? God, there are those hammers again."
Clink, Clink! they sounded, pounding away in the night, clear and even as the ticking of a clock.
"They will have it cut by morning," whispered Klein Piet. "What will happen then?"
Piet was listening to the sounds, with his pipe poised in front of his mouth. He shook his head.
"I don't know," he answered. "But we will see. Klein Piet, you and I will keep the brand-wacht to-night. If anything is to happen, we will be awake for it."
"Yes, father," answered Klein Piet mechanically, and then the talk between them dropped. On either side of the fire they sat in long stages of silence, listening to the hammers plying in the night, their noise making a rhythm above the slow murmur of the water on the beach. A little wind got up, blowing from the north; it carried the scent of the seaweed and the damp sand to their nostrils and fanned their smoldering fire to a clearer glow. Somewhere in the bush a jackal sobbed like a lost child; the wood ask clicked and rustled as it burned out and settled down. And through it all, like the dominant of a harmony, the hammers spoke their unceasing clink and the darkness stirred like a windy arras.
Perhaps the rhythm lulled him somewhat; perhaps he was but sunk in a deeper thought; but Piet did not notice his son spring to his feet. Klein Piet shook him from his stupor; he came back to himself and to the agitated face of the young man leaning over him.