When Gideon van der Walt reached the mountain saddle at the head of the kloof, across which the track which led into the desert plains of Bushmanland passed, he turned and took a long look at his homestead. Then his glance wandered searchingly over the valley in which his life had been passed. There it lay, green and fertile,—for the south-western rains had fallen heavily and often during the last few months. The black, krantzed ranges glowed in the noontide sun. The last spot his eye rested upon before he crossed the saddle was the little patch of vivid foliage surrounding the spring on the tiny ripples of which his life and the lives of so many others had been wrecked. Just on the edge of the copse the stream seemed to hang like a bright jewel, as the sunlight glinted from the pure, limpid water.
As Gideon turned away his eyes grew moist for an instant, and he felt a queer, unbidden feeling of almost tenderness for the brother with whom among these hills and valleys he had played and hunted in the days of his innocence, creeping like a tendril about his heart. But he crushed the feeling down, and rode on with his hat pressed over his eyebrows.
On the other side of the mountain pass the outlook was different. He was on the north-eastern limit of the coast rains. Bushmanland depended for its uncertain rainfall upon thunderstorms from the north in the summer season. But for two years no rain had fallen anywhere near the southern fringe of the desert, so the plains which stretched forth northward from Gideon’s feet were utterly void of green vegetation.
To one familiar with the desert the sight before him had an awful significance; it meant that there was no water, nor any vegetation worth considering for at least a hundred and fifty miles. Gideon had known, by the fact of the larger game flocking down into the valleys, that Bushmanland was both verdureless and waterless, and that anyone who should attempt to cross it would incur a terrible risk.
But nothing before him could compete for terror with what he was fleeing from. Setting spurs to his horse Gideon passed the wagon; then he rode ahead at a walk, the patient oxen following with the rumbling wagon, upon his tracks.
Chapter Seventeen.
The Return of Stephanus.
“Come, child, it is past our time for sleep,” said Aletta. She was sitting on the sofa in the voorhuis. It was midnight of the day of Gideon’s departure. Elsie stood at the open window which faced the south. The night was still and sultry and a dense fog covered the earth.