“Well, on the same night I had such a curious dream. I saw Isaac, as plain as ever you like, sitting under a tree full of red and yeller apples. He was wrapped in the cloth we put in his coffin, and was laughing fit to split hisself.”
I gave an involuntary start, for my dream of the same night flashed across my mind. After making the most solemn promises not to reveal the tale—except under certain improbable eventualities which, strangely enough, have since become actual—I bade farewell to old Scarren and walked away thinking, for the first time, that there might, after all, be something true in Chimer’s creed.
Chapter Nine.
Chicken Wings.
“A chiel’s amang ye takin’ notes,
And, faith, he’ll prent it.”—Burns.
One
It was by a mere coincidence that Raymond Benson and John Allister, who were both bound for Rossdale, met in the train running from Cape Town to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. Rossdale is a large mission institution situate in one of what are known as the Native Territories. It is liberally endowed by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and has for its object the evangelisation and education of Bantu natives.
Benson, a Cape Colonist by birth, had obtained through the Cape Education Department the appointment of second teacher at the Institution; Allister had just arrived from Scotland, and had been selected by the Central Mission Board as book-keeper and general accountant. As he had acquired a fair amount of medical knowledge—he had, as a matter of fact, only been prevented by financial misfortune from finishing his courses at the University of Edinburgh and qualifying as a physician—he was also expected to practise the healing art among the residents at the Mission.