“A blind girl.—Where was she?”
“On the footpath behind the house.”
“And where did she come from?”
“I do not know; she would not tell me. I think she must be mad, for she said she was going to talk to the Governor and she asked me where he lived.”
“What an extraordinary thing.”
“Yes. She was walking with a little Hottentot man, who was leading her by means of a stick. She said they were both very hungry, so I gave them some bread and milk. I left them sitting at the side of the path, eating, and when I went back to look for them they were gone.”
Elsie and Kanu sat at the side of a stream in a deep ravine in the western face of the Drakenstein Mountain range. Around them was a mass of dense scrub which was gay with lovely flowers. The child drooped wearily as she sat with her swollen feet in the cool, limpid water. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, her lips parted, and her eyes shone with strange brilliancy. It was the morning of the sixth day after they had stolen away from Elandsfontein. Kanu looked gaunt with hunger. Famine seemed to glare out of his hollow eyes. In spite of the proverbial toughness of the Bushman, he was almost in the last stage of exhaustion. A belt made of twisted bark was tightly bound around his waist, and a bundle of grass and moss, rolled into a ball, was forced between it and his body, over the abdomen.
“Kanu,—how much farther do you think Cape Town is?” asked Elsie in a tired voice.
“I have heard the people say that the town lies under a big mountain with a flat top,” replied the Bushman,—“I can see such a mountain far away across the sand-flats. We will reach it to-morrow night if your feet do not get too sore.”