Old Schalk was a well-known character, and was looked upon as a patriarch and an oracle by the Trek-Boers for hundreds of miles around. He had been a famous man in his day, and could tell interesting, semi-veracious anecdotes of adventures with Bushmen, lions, and other things—predatory or preyed upon. He had never seen a village in his life, excepting the adventitious assemblages of the Trek-Boers. He was known to be a hard man at a bargain, and extremely avaricious; nevertheless he was poor. A few years previous to the period at which this tale opens he had been rich in flocks and herds. Then came the inevitably recurring drought, this time one of exceptional severity. The sheep and goats became thinner and thinner, until they were too weak to go abroad and seek for pasturage. They lay on the sand all day long, eyeing piteously the troughs to which their diminishing dole of water was lifted from the well by the creaking derrick. At last the maddened cattle flung themselves down the well, and their ruined owners were hardly able to drag themselves to the arid banks of the Orange River down the sand-choked gorge at Pella. Here was at least water to drink.
Old Schalk, like most of his neighbours, found himself a poor man. Since the famine he had managed to get a little stock together again, but he was in debt to several Jew hawkers, and had some difficulty in keeping his head above water.
He held the appointment under Government of Assistant Field Cornet. It was his duty in this capacity to report all crimes to the Special Magistrate, to arrest criminals, and to hold inquests in cases of deaths by violence in regard to which there was no suspicion of foul play. This office gave him a certain position among the Trek-Boers and added considerably to his influence.
Old Schalk’s wife was only a few years younger than himself, but, as is especially the case with Boer women, she looked much older. His special grievance against Providence was that Mrs Hattingh had lived so long, and thus kept him out of the enjoyment of the charms of younger women.
“There is my brother Gert,” he would say in moments of confidence, and without considering whether his wife were present or not, “he has now married his third wife; Willem only the other day lost his second; Jan, who is fifteen years younger than I, buried his first wife only five months ago and is going to marry a fine young girl at the next Nachtmaal—and here I am still sitting with my old ‘Bogh’,”—a word which may be freely translated as “frump.”
From Old Schalk’s point of view he undoubtedly had a grievance, for one rarely meets an old Boer—and more especially a Trek-Boer—who has not been married several times.
Mrs Hattingh never appeared to be hurt by such outbursts against unpropitious Fate. She had no intention of dying just yet; sentiment was to her unknown, and she had always taken life philosophically.
“Ja,” she would sometimes rejoin, “it is true that I am an old ‘Bogh,’ but there’s not a woman in Bushmanland who can sew karosses as well as I; and if it had not been for the money you got from the Jews for those I made from the skins of the sheep that died in the drought, you would not have any stock to-day.”
“Ja; that is true,” Old Schalk would grudgingly admit.
“And you would be a fine one to follow a young wife about and keep her in order; with those legs you could not walk the length of the trek-chain.”