Chapter IV: Part 4

The Governor mounted the stairs. Jean Jacques whistled under his breath, Pierre wiped the cold sweat from his brow, and they followed. The Governor passed into the room through the open door; as they paused for one second, they could see Cecile’s eyes turned lovingly on him and her hands stretched out; her old nurse was sitting at the head of the bed on one side, and a doctor was on the other. A lamp, turned low, gave a fitful light; the Governor reached forward and turned it up.

‘_Dieu merci, nous avons de la chance_,’ thought Jacques, ‘at all events she will not take us for ghosts or bogies;’ then, with head up, and a smile on his lips and in his eyes, he marched boldly into the room, Pierre following like a dog.

The Governor, standing back in the shadow, his head bowed, stood watching his little daughter with eyes that burned like coals of fire in the hollows of his wasted cheeks.

No one spoke.

As Jacques moved forward, the child turned her eyes from her father towards him; when they lighted upon him, a look of curiosity, but not of fear, dwelt in them for a moment, then a smile dimpled up in the brave little face, her hand moved, and her lips parted as if to blow a kiss to her guests.

Jacques advanced to the bed and stroked the little head--Pierre stood at the foot and grinned with sympathy.

‘It is enough,’ said the Governor, ‘you are _men_; go, and God save you.’

THE SPIRIT OF THE KARROO.

‘Oh! the trail is hot, and the heart is black,
Sleuth, and stealth, and a hard-gripped blade!
Over the shimmering sage-green brush,
Under the lea of the kopje’s rise,
Winding the skein of the narrow track,
Sleuth, and stealth, till the debt is paid!’

Greed, Hate, Jealousy, these three, and the greatest of these is Jealousy.

Now this is true according to Euclid, who says that the greater contains the less: it is also true that in 1891--was it? Pietris Vanhiever--

* * * * *

‘My--ahh--my a--a a,’ yawned a--large gaunt silver-backed jackal out of the long grass by the side of a little stone _kopje_. Anon he raised his head and licked his gums in a slow and appreciative manner, as if a pleasant thought had occurred to him. The night was drawing in over the sandy plain, Namaqua partridges were flitting to the half-dried waterhole, the spring-bok were drawing together, and forming serried squadrons against the possible attack of such as Silverback of the stealthy foot and hungry fang; and from the Englishman’s camp hard by came the smothered grunt and squeal of the mules beginning with rapture their evening feed out of the leather trough slung to the waggon pole.

The stones of the _kopje_ moved, and an aged one-eyed hyæna slunk out into the grey-green growth that surrounded his home. He sidled deprecatingly till within speaking distance of the jackal, and said in a whisper, the huskiness of which was born of much midnight prowling and many an unholy meal:

‘Is there meat in the wind, friend, that thou lickest so thy good red gums and white teeth? If perchance it be so, I pray thee remember thy old comrade, the widower and one-eyed.’

‘Meat,’ snarled the jackal, ‘ay, ay, but meat is for those who can see;’ and casting a sneering glance at the bleared face of his visitor, he resumed his careful watch on the camp.

‘Peradventure it is mule, O crafty one?’ said the old reprobate, leering covetously towards the newly-lighted fire that threw the encampment into sharp relief against the fast gathering darkness.

‘Bah!’ said Silverback, ‘mule! mule is good enough for prowling one-eyed vagabonds, but not for me. I would sooner chase a young buck through the long night than eat a plaguey salt beast like mule.’

‘Ow--ah,’ sighed the hyæna, ‘your Swiftness may indeed speak so, having legs of steel and jaws like cast-iron traps; but to one who has fasted these many days, being old and forsaken, mule and meer-cat ’tis all the same, it goes into the stomach--what more can I expect, who am old, and nigh to my end?’ and he rolled his eye imploringly at Silverback.

‘Well, well,’ said the latter somewhat mollified, ‘I say nothing; for two nights have I watched and hunted, and what I have seen, I have seen.’ With this enigmatical remark he sat up, and regarded his aged companion with a critical glance. ‘Truly he _is_ old,’ he said to himself; ‘he cannot count greatly on a division, and having a certain experience of graves, perchance he may be of service, the hoary old sinner. Watch with me if you will,’ he snarled aloud.

So bidden, the one-eye joined the two eyes, and with them glared on steadily and patiently through the dark at the white man’s camp.

* * * * *

‘When you’ve finished supper, Dan, saddle me Hopper’s horse; I’m going to have a try in the dark at that last lot of buck we saw this afternoon.’

The speaker, a long, careless-looking Englishman, with blue eyes and a fair beard, sat kicking his legs over the side of the waggon and smoking a short pipe with much contentment after his supper.

Dan Vanhiever, a swarthy half-caste, part Kaffir, part Boer, with a slight limp, rose at once from his recumbent posture with his feet to the fire, and assisted by a Hottentot boy, with many a hoarse ‘_Yuip, Schelm!_’ detached and saddled the much-resenting grey, who, with his companion Waltong, was taking alternate bites at the fodder and the mules from either side of the leather trough.

‘Good-night, boys! keep the fire going, so that I can find my way back; so long!’ The Englishman swung himself into the saddle, and taking his rifle, rode away on the back track of the waggon.

Early to sleep is the rule on the _veldt_, and two of the three followers left in the camp turned their toes to the fire and slumbered noisily.

The third, Pietris Vanhiever, sat forward, his hands on his knees, his swarthy, black-browed face flushed and scowling, a smouldering light in his eyes;--or was it only the reflection from the blazing fire, on to which he heaped plentifully the gathered brushwood?

Presently he stood up, glancing stealthily at his companions, his hand on a long knife in his belt,--a picturesque figure, in red shirt, blue jean trousers, widening and opening in the seam towards the foot, and sewn with hair, and the wide-brimmed felt hat of South Africa.

‘Ah, Boss! two nights have I watched, and two days have I fasted, and now I will make an end,’ he muttered in Dutch between his teeth, and bent down to see if both men were asleep. Then he crept noiselessly out of the camp circle, and stooping almost double, ran swiftly as a man runs who knows the end and purpose of his going.

* * * * *

Silverback turned his sardonic mug towards his ghoul-like neighbour, and with a twirl of his brush, as much as to say, ‘I told you so,’ stole out of the shadow of the little _kopje_ and followed silently on the trail. With every hair on his bristly back standing up in unholy eagerness, with his one eye and his few remaining teeth staring with greed, the ancient reprobate grunted the magic word ‘Man,’ and hobbled cautiously after the jackal....

* * * * *

The long Englishman, glancing from side to side, rode carelessly and slowly along the track left by the broad wheels of the waggon. Once he unslung the Winchester he carried on his right arm, and fired two or three shots, but seemingly at random. The track took a sudden turn to the left, round a slight rise in the ground; once past this he urged the grey into a canter, turning round in his saddle to see that he was not followed.

‘Can’t be seen from the waggon here,’ he said to himself; ‘not that it matters much, though--their manners are disgusting, and assuredly morals they have none. Covering my trail is much the same as going to church in the old country for the benefit of the servants,’ he added with a laugh.

The light from the risen moon was fairly strong, and the track, luckily free from meer-cat holes, lay straight over the _veldt_ towards a large broken group of sandy red rocks of curious formation. Their irregular outlines took weird and mysterious shapes in the half light, and their happening in the vast flat desolation of the _Karroo_ gave them the appearance of being the creation of some saturninely fantastic spirit. The track ran so narrowly between two of the biggest rocks that a driver could touch them on either side of him with his whip. Out of the red soil of the rock on the one side grew a giant Cokerbôm tree, old as the world itself, projected in a stiff uncompromising rigidity over the track. The Englishman, riding rapidly beneath, reached up and plucked a spiky, inhospitable leaf.

‘Tough old beggar!’ he soliloquised, sucking his finger, ‘you’ll be growing here when _I’m_ dead and gone, and all’s blue; in a couple of thousand years you _may_ be a foot or so taller if you have luck; rum things, trees--wonder if they have souls?’

He emerged into the open _veldt_ again, and another half hour’s canter brought him within sight of an isolated piece of civilisation; the lengthy, low, white buildings of an outlying Boer ostrich-farm, in a square enclosure, dotted with carefully fostered and unwilling plane and eucalyptus trees.

‘Steady!’ he muttered, ‘she said last night she’d be at this end--yes, and that’s the tree. He reined in his horse. ‘There she is, by heaven! What a blessing to find a woman punctual; but then she isn’t a woman, only a girl--poor child!’

With a half sigh he swung himself from the saddle, and, leading his horse, stepped forward to where, shrinking in the shadow of a couple of trees just on the outside of the enclosure, stood a slip of a girl in a white dress with a dark cloak thrown over it. Her grey eyes lost their look of fright, and devoured him, as he fastened his horse to a branch; with a low cry, almost a moan, of delight, she straightened herself and sprang into his arms.

‘How long have you been here, _Liebchen mein?_’ He spoke in Africander, with an occasional German word.

‘O my King, I came as soon as the house was quiet and I could steal out. I came like a mouse, with my heart in my mouth, and two hours I have waited and suffered, but now--now--O my Lord and King, I live, and the darkness is overpast--see, I have brought all that I have, as thou badest me.’ She lifted a slight bundle wrapped in a light rug, and placed her other hand timidly, with oh! so light a touch, upon his beard. ‘Is my Lord’ (she used a word that in Africander means also husband) ‘pleased with his servant?’

Her face flushed painfully and anxiously. Truth to tell, he did not look over-pleased--he stood looking pitifully first at the bundle, then at the slight figure that leaned so lovingly, and yet so timidly, against him, and the shadow of an almost seriousness came over the careless blue eyes. He put his hand on the long fair hair, and said gently:

‘All that my pretty does is good, and shall she not be rewarded?’ He raised her chin, and kissed her eyes and lips. ‘Yet I am sorry too, for I have been thinking, and it cannot be to-night--I can’t take you away to-night, child.’

Her head drooped and she shivered. ‘Not to-night--not to-night? But my Lord _promised_ me.’

‘Yes, child, I know, but there are many things I didn’t think of that I _must_ do before we go away. I must go back to Cape Town and put things straight. Cheer up, sweetheart, ’tis only for a fortnight, or three weeks at most, and then I will come and take you away for good and all.’

‘I’m afraid--so afraid. If my Lord leaves me, he may forget, he will see other women, and I am so poor and little--let me come now, my King, only to be near thee--I won’t ask more, just to be near thee--_let_ me come.’

‘Dear child, be reasonable--think a minute, think of the waggon. I can’t leave that, and we should be followed and overtaken at once, and there’d be the devil to pay. Then think of my men--I don’t want my little flower amongst rough swine like the Vanhievers.’

‘Vanhiever!’ The girl shrank out of his arms, and stood staring wildly at him. ‘What Vanhiever? not Pietris--not Pietris?’

‘Ay, Pietris and Dan--what ails you, child?’

‘My God! O my God!’ She sprang back to him, and threw her arms round his neck, and drew his head down to hers with a gesture of protection.

‘He doesn’t know, does he? Tell me, he doesn’t know?’

‘What _is_ the matter, you funny child? You’re shaking all over! _Who_ doesn’t know, _what_?’

‘He, Pietris. Don’t you know? Didn’t you hear? He was my lover. I was betrothed to him,--_him_ that I hated, and he swore to kill any one that came between. Did not my Lord know?’

Her voice fell again, and she spoke in a terrified whisper.

He flung his head back. ‘Not I,’ he said, with a laugh.

‘The hog, to raise his eyes to you! Well, dear, it’s all right, he knows nothing;’--then, as a thought struck him, he went on with a sort of relief, ‘but don’t you see, that settles it, it can’t be while he’s with me--won’t do at all.’

‘No, no, and O, my Love, be careful--don’t come here again. You don’t know him; he is a devil, and the child of devils.’

She clung to him despairingly.

‘All right, my darling, trust me. I’ll make tracks for Cape Town to-morrow, and you must promise me to be a good child and keep a brave heart, and then--think, only two weeks--three at the longest--there, there.’

She lay resting in his arms, her face buried against his shoulder, stifling the sobs that _would_ come; then, raising her head, she said quickly and passionately:

‘Go, my Lord, go, and quickly; thou may’st be missed, and remember, he is a devil--yes, a _devil_. In three weeks thou wilt return.’ She looked full in his face. ‘Go, and by this--and this--do not forget thy servant.’

She put her lips to his and kissed him passionately twice.

‘No, my darling, no.’ There was a husk in his throat, and the careless gaiety of his voice was shaken. He mounted and rode away, looking back at the slight figure leaning against the tree, with hands clasped to her breast in a dumb agony.

After he lost sight of her, he rode for some time silently, his head drooping; then, as a man will who has been much on the _veldt_, he began talking to himself disjointedly:

‘Poor little thing!--I don’t know--I don’t know--am I a most awful brute, or what am I? What am I going to do? Devil only knows--this is a mess, my boy, whichever way you look at it. She’s a sweet child, but--my God, for always, and then--my people--and then--the world--and then--her people, umm--Boers, bah! Brutes! Too many “and then’s”--Strikes me I’ve been a fool--a dashed fool. Well, can’t be helped; what’s to be done now, that’s the point?’

The grey tossed up his head and neighed--they were fast nearing the rocky island in the desert of sand and scrub.

‘What’s to be done? cut and run? My Gad, it’s blackguardly, but _que voulez vous_? it’s wise.--Go back to her? Poor little thing! I’d like to, fast enough, I’m fond enough of her now, _but_--always a d----d “but,” and this time a devil of a d----d “but.”’ The grey stumbled, and his thoughts were jerked into another train. ‘That swine Pietris! The impudence of the brute! Leave her--that means--to him--By gum! I can’t stand that--it’s not on the cards at all--to him, the blackguard! By George, no! I shall _have_ to go back to her, oh! decidedly I shall have to go back, and the sooner the better, and, d----n it, I’m glad of it.’

He urged the tired horse forward with voice and heel, and entered the narrow passage between the giant rocks.

* * * * *

There was silence where the venerable Cokerbôm tree, from under its grim red-grey protectors through unnumbered centuries, laid a gnarled and fantastic shadow across the moonlit track. That little world of rocks and sand, of scanty brush and tree, held its breath. In the death-like stillness the spirit of the Pass seemed to be straining to catch an approaching sound.

A long, deep-drawn, hissing breath, and again that brooding silence, while the moonlight played for an instant on the silver tongue waiting in the mesmerised space for its brief repast. Along a knotted, spikey branch Pietris Vanhiever crouched, grasping in his hand a naked, long-bladed knife; his sinewy arm, on which the dark swollen veins stood out like cords, was stretched so as to give full play to a swift and sudden blow. His teeth bared in hungry expectation, every nerve strained in eager listening, he waited for the fulfilment of his vow, and the satisfaction of that passion of jealousy, which, after his two days of absolute bodily starvation, dominated his half-caste being to the extinction of every other feeling.

Presently there came within the ken of his hungry spirit a muffled regular sound drawing rapidly nearer--without doubt the footfall of a horse on the soft sand. His black eyes gleamed under their heavy brows with a sombre fire, and gripping the branch more closely, he swung his arm once, twice, backwards and downwards, then drew it close to the branch again and waited.

‘Loppety, loppety, loppety’ came the swing of that peculiar three-legged canter that was steadily and virtuously making for the Englishman the first stage of that route that should put his little girl--his own property--for ever out of the reach of such swine as Pietris Vanhiever.

‘That _he_, forsooth--_he_--good Lord! it’s almost comic--certainly quite impossible!--Yes, this big _Kopje’s_ the first landmark--shall see the camp fire from the other side--unless the lazy hogs have let it out--hallo’....

The silent scream of the thirsty knife backwards and downwards, the hollow groan, the soft thump of the body on the sand, the frightened snort and sudden wheeling of the riderless horse, the hiss and dart of the destroyer on his prey--these things are written in the dumb records of the giant and changeless tree.

The sound of the grey’s hoofs fleeing back in the direction from whence he had come had faded away before Pietris raised himself from the body of his enemy.

Dead, oh! undoubtedly dead; the good knife had gone home just below the left shoulder--no need of a second blow--a famous place, that. Yet he was sorry too--it would have been good to have struck again, and yet again, and--ah! that hated face! should he crush it shapeless with his heel, staring up at him careless and proud even in death? Should he? Should he? The Kaffir blood in him surged in waves to his heart, the desire to mutilate and mangle his enemy smote him sore. Not with his boot, though--no--no--leave signs--besides, too soft; only _Veldt schoens_; no--the knife again, blade or handle--all the same. He leant over and strained at the handle; as he strove to draw it from the wound, the eyes of the dead man seemed to roll and fix themselves on his. With a cry of superstitious terror he recoiled, and to his vision, maddened by passion, weakened by physical exhaustion and starvation, the blanched lips of the corpse moved in the old smile of cynical mockery.

A nameless dread seized upon him--the white man in him, that had given the nerve and passionate resolution for the steadfast fulfilment of his vow, gave place in a moment to the unreasoning, superstitious savage.

The man’s body was dead--he knew that assuredly--but his spirit was alive and _there_--that proud and sneering spirit that he could not slay. He shrank back and crouched in a huddled heap against the rock, watching with fascinated gaze the movements of his enemy.

Now, to a diseased and distorted vision moonlight plays queer tricks with things. The tortures of the damned came upon Pietris Vanhiever, and, greatest torture of all, he was deprived of the power of flight. It seemed to his terror-ridden brain that the spirit through those eyes was drawing him slowly--slowly--to the body of his victim, there to hold him to eternity. Then a fresh horror came upon him, and the devil of superstition turned his thoughts to the tales crooned to him by his Kaffir mother, in the half light of the evenings, at the door of the native hut. The tales of the spirit of the Karroo, the Great Spirit, that comes to the souls of men whose lives and blood are spent upon the Karroo’s breast, and gathers them to itself; the legends of the woe and ruth that befall the living man who looks upon the gathering of that harvest; and he shook with the cold fear that seized upon, and paralysed, his limbs and knees. So minutes and hours went by, and the moon dropped low behind the great rocks, and a black darkness came over the pass of death, and ever the white upturned face held him through the blackness in a stupor of terror, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, save only, in those staring, shining eyes, the spirit of his enemy.

Ah--h--h, what was _that_?--at the end of the Pass, what was that?--white, silent through the darkness--what was it? _Lieber Gott_, what was it? Coming, white and terrible, yes, coming to the harvest.

‘_Ah!_’--and screaming aloud in superstitious horror, ‘The spirit of the Karroo! the spirit of the Karroo!’ he fell back heavily in a dead swoon....

Hopper’s horse, stumbling in the blackness against something soft lying athwart the narrow track, bent down his head and sniffed, then with a snort of terror and disgust wheeled round and vanished for the second time riderless into the night.

* * * * *

The breath that stirs over the Karroo before the first streak of dawn, straying into the heart of the great _Kopje_, stirred the soft down on the tips of Silverback’s ears, and played faintly with the beard on the dead man’s face.

‘The dawn is at hand, O Lord of the far-smelling nostrils and steel-like jaws, would it not be well to bite and sup, if but just a little, for surely this be dead also, he has not moved these two hours.’

‘Try and see,’ snarled the jackal.

The hyæna drew back his grizzled snout with a grunt of disgust and alarm.

‘The Mother of all hyænas forbid! _I_ touch a whole man, _fresh_, that also might yet be living! Nay, nay, but do thou, who knowest not fear, make trial and see if he be really good corpse, and no longer two-legged demon, and I will withdraw a while and keep good watch at the hinder end.’

‘Coward!’ grumbled the jackal, watching him shrink to the outside of the _Kopje_. ‘But as for me,’ he grunted to himself, ‘the day is at hand, and my stomach calls loudly.’

Licking his long red gums, he stole forward from his lurking place in the crumbled sand, and set his white fangs in the fleshy part of Pietris’ leg, not omitting to beat a rapid retreat, in case of unexpected developments.

The murderer’s death-like swoon was not proof against the meeting of those steel-like jaws. He groaned uneasily, and rolling round, raised himself stiffly and slowly to a sitting posture.

‘A thousand devils!’ he muttered, rubbing his leg, from which the blood flowed freely, ‘what fool’s game is this?’

Then his bewildered eyes in the fitful grey glimmer, that before the coming of the dawn forced itself into the recesses of the _Kopje_, fell on the upturned face of the Englishman. With a start Pietris sprang to his feet, recollection of the events and the horror of the night coming with a rush to his awakening mind. He staggered, then shrinkingly crept forward, and, bending over the body of his victim, looked long and fearfully into the glazed eyes.

‘It is gone!’ he muttered, ‘gone, gathered--and I--woe is me!--ruin and death--I have seen the harvest;--well, there is no more fear in that trash,’--he spurned the prostrate body,--‘except for this’--and stooping, with a great effort he wrenched the knife from the wound. He plunged it into the ground, and, wiping it carefully, replaced it in his belt. His eye in stooping caught the fresh spoor of Silverback and his companion.

‘_Gott sei dank!_’ he muttered, ‘there needs no burial here,’ and his eye followed the spoor into a cave at the rock base. Once again he looked at the helpless corpse, and a thought came into his mind. He rolled from the side of the rocks a large stone, rubbed on it some of the blood still dripping from his own leg, and placed it close to the head of the dead man--then: ‘It will be thought he fell, and struck his head, for soon there will be but bones,’ he said with a grin; then with a muttered oath, and a hurried look around and back, half of fear and half of hate, he fled painfully and wearily, but with noiseless steps, towards where in the far distance the embers of the camp fire still cast a red glow, and whence an occasional grunt from a half-slumbering mule was borne towards him on the breath of the dawn. Rapidly and wearily he fled, in the misty half light, and behind him in the darkness rose and fell the unearthly yowl--the jackal’s grace before meat.

‘The feast begins,’ he muttered, and as answering cries came from the scrub to the right and left of him, ‘Good eating, all of you!--this was he born for.’

* * * * *

‘Not guilty’ was the verdict; ‘guilty, but not enough evidence,’ the comment of the Court, for Hopper’s horse, a gaunt silverbacked jackal, and a Cokerbôm tree were not asked to give testimony.

To this day, if you should chance to take Pietris Vanhiever with you on a shooting trip, do not over your camp fire discourse on native superstitions pertaining to the _Karroo_--it is calculated to upset an otherwise good hunter.

A PRAIRIE OYSTER

‘I drink my love at the fall of night,
As the glow dies out of the Western sky;
I drink to the whirr of the widgeon’s flight,
And the coyote’s yowl, as we drundle by.

‘I drink my love in the prairie morn,
With a “Hey! farewell!” to the falling moon,
To the stars a-point at the flush of dawn,
And the waking cry of the watchful loon.

‘I drink my love in the heat and glare,
With the sun a-flame on the silent lake;
I drink to the hum of the quivering air,
To the beat and throb of the world awake.

‘Here’s a toast to them all! And it’s sung refrain
Is the clink and jar of a westward train.’

We droned along in one of those fits of despondency peculiar to trains that have an immensity of flat ground in which to pick up their lost time.

The night was a lovely one, hot, with a bright moon silvering the prairie, and trying vainly to throw shadows in a shadowless space. In a meditative mood, I lounged on the platform against the open door of the smoking car, and it seemed to me that I was taking a lesson in the comprehension of infinity. A rolling plain as far as the eye could reach--not a tree--not a house--as limitless and as empty as the sky itself.

A peculiar feeling of rest and freedom at first possessed me; I was, or thought I was, beginning to understand many things hitherto unrevealed, to have a sympathy with Simon Stylites, and an appreciation of Mahatmaism; but soon a wild desire to project myself indefinitely into space seized upon me. The moonlight and the vastness were getting into my brain--a little more, and I might have leapt from the train, and run until nature or prairie dog holes should assert their influence upon me;--and then with a saving grace, a couple of coyotes appeared from behind a hillock, and played with their tails in the moonlight--and the spell was broken.

I became conscious that my cigar was out, that the mosquitoes were annoyingly attentive. Better to be a limited being in a smoking car and not itch, than to be an unlimited being outside it and itch most ‘demnibly.’ I went back into the smoking-room.

Empty, thank heaven--no professionals from the Golden City to talk faro and rowdyism; no commercials to bombard one with down Eastern brag, the decline of Winnipeg, or the future of Vancouver and the C. P. R.; no globe-trotting sportsman to bewail his luck in the Rockies, or abuse the British Columbian for a liar.

‘Empty, thank God.’

‘Take a light, sir?’ said a soft, rather high pitched, drawling voice under my left elbow. I jumped, and, to disguise it, smote my cheek, where a mosquito might have been, but was not.

A man of about forty, a long figure in a sleeping suit, with a lean, brown, clean-shaven face, courteously bending forward, held towards me the lighted end of a cigar.

‘Thanks very much, sir; delighted to find I’m not alone.’

‘_Not_ empty, thank God;’ said Mr Dick Denver, in an unmoved voice.

‘My dear sir,’ said I, sitting down next to him, ‘I should’nt have dreamed of that remark, if I’d seen _you_; but you were so completely tucked away in that corner, that I’d no idea you were here, and I must confess I _was_ uncommonly glad not to see our ’Frisco friends, or the bummers’ (_Anglice_ commercial travellers).

‘Guess you’re right; they are kind of tiring.’

‘What beats me,’ I went on, ‘is the way people like that, who really have nothing to say, insist upon saying it, and, by Gad, enjoy saying it, and are certain you enjoy hearing them say it, and set you down as a condemned fool if you don’t say it yourselves.’

‘Right,’ said Mr Denver; ‘for a man that spreads himself around to be dull, give me a woman first, and then a bummer. And yet,’ he went on meditatively, ‘there are some profoundly interesting beetles amongst that last tribe; and--amongst the other too.’ He sighed, and relapsed into the silent puffing of his cigar. I had not travelled from Montreal nearly to Calgary with Mr Denver without discovering that he was a silent man on all subjects, and on the subject of women a dumb, and apparently a deaf image. Try him upon the subject of ‘bummers’ the oyster might open for once, I thought, but without much hope.

‘Did you ever have anything to do with any curious specimen?’ I said carelessly.

‘Some,’ he said; ‘one mainly--Irishman--he travelled in wine; I guess he was the smartest coon I ever struck, but no head--or rather too much head, like a glass of stout.’

‘All Irishmen are like that,’ I said, sententiously and untruthfully; then, with a cautious insertion of the opener, ‘what was his name?’

‘Kinahan; we called him Kinjan,’ and--more to himself than to me--‘Jupiter! I was in the tightest kind of a hole with that cuss and one other.’

‘Really tight?’ said I.

‘Never tighter, except about three times, and those I don’t take much stock in talking of.’

‘Women?’ I said hardily. He nodded.

‘And others,’ he added, as if he had thereby over-committed himself.

‘It seems to me,’ said I, feeling the opener deepening in the shell, ‘you don’t “take much stock” in talking of anything, considering that you really have got something to say; tell me this yarn of Kinjan, and be a benefactor to a poor sleep-forsaken devil.’

Mr Denver chewed the end of his cigar.

‘Bore you world without end,’ he said.

‘Try me,’ I besought.

‘We must have drinks, then.’ He heaved himself up, and called melodiously over the car platforms.

When the materials had been brought, Mr Denver constructed himself his favourite pick-me-up, in which raw egg and cayenne pepper formed the chief ingredients.

‘Let me mix you one,’ he said; ‘guess you won’t weaken on it; it’s short, but it’s breezy.’

We drank together, and our hearts were opened within us, and we became as brothers. Through the open door and window the wonderful silver prairie night came in, and the lamp of the smoking-room flickered and went out before its breath. We swallowed another prairie oyster each, and the strings of Mr Dick Denver’s tongue were unloosed, and he spake plain, if a little through his nose.

And as he spake, the snoring from the sleeping-saloon and the snorting of the engine became to me as the roaring of the surf upon the sea-shore, and the rolling prairie as the sands of the desert, and afar off a lone clump of trees shining white under the moon as the minarets of a distant Moorish city.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was moving around one time on a cargo steamer, calculating to go to Madeira or Teneriffe, and see what I could strike out of those parts. Well, you know, I don’t cotton to “tramps;” they’re a pretty ordinary lot, and the one I was on that trip was tough, just tough; from the skipper down to the bacon the whole show was tough. There were only three passengers on board: myself, this Kinjan, and a long Britisher, by name Torin--the Hon. Christopher Torin was his full label.’ Mr Denver paused, and tilted his head back in his seat, and in this attitude, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, resumed, through a cloud of smoke.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I guess I am of opinion _that_ Mr Torin was by a considerable way the coolest and the silentest cuss I ever struck, and I’ve had experience; but with it, mind you, he was the most reckless devil that ever let in to make the universe hum. He wasn’t long out of some mess or other--woman, I heard--and likely enough--poor beggar!’--and Mr Denver heaved a sigh of smoke that brought a stupefied mosquito down from the ceiling. Presently he resumed.

‘He was a long, good-looking chap, with a don’t-care look, and one of those short, fair beards that grow on so many of you Britishers--going a bit grey--and an extraordinary strong man, thick through, and long in the limb. He was going down to Madeira, to fetch one of the South African boats for a shooting trip. We three used to mess together, you know, and got pretty thick,--Kinjan blowing around and spreading himself, Torin smoking and drinking, and now and then nodding his head, and I laying up and figuring them out--not for professional reasons, but because it’s kind of got to be a habit of mine, and they were two of the queerest bugs.

“Not alone in their glory,” I thought to myself, but, beyond a grunt of appreciation, said nothing; the oyster was fairly open now.

‘Well, one evening about four bells,--while we were making down pretty near in to the Morocco coast, and about a hundred miles top side of Mogador,--I was leaning over the port rail aft, snuffing up the phosphorus, and admiring at the right down smartness of the skipper, shoving in shore on a real reefy coast, when there came an everlasting jolt, and before I could get in the thin end of a cuss, I guess I was treading water, and blowing like a grampus, forty yards from a fast-sinking ship. It wasn’t any good going back--that was clear--she wouldn’t be above water another five minutes, so I lit out and shoved for the shore,--a long white streaky line about a quarter of a mile off, with a blamed current setting me off it. I had to get there, or bust, and I _got_, but it was stiff going, and when I had made the sand I was as badly roasted as a leg of pork.

‘I easied a bit, and lay up with my legs in the water, though the tide running out soon left them high and dry. By and bye, I came round, and concluded to prospect along that shore, and see if any other wreckage had come to hand. It was pretty dark, but the sands were easy going, and there was a moon just getting up. I guess I hadn’t gone above a few hundred yards when I saw something white, about the height of a man’s figure, rising out of the sand a short way off. When I got nearer I saw it _was_ a man, Torin himself, leaning on an oar and looking down at his legs, which were quite bare.

‘I fetched out a howl of joy, and ran for him. I remember he just turned his head, and all he said was: “Haven’t got a pair of breeches to lend a chap, have you?” Seems he’d been in his berth when the ship struck, and the lower end of his pyjamas had sprung and cut adrift in swimming, and left him in pale pink above, and another kind of a pale pink below. Being a tidy sort of a cuss, he was a good piece annoyed, so I reckoned we had better get right along with the prospecting, and it might be we should run on that nether end. However, we didn’t, and presently, as we were a good bit stretched with swimming against the tide, we lay up under a sand hillock and had considerable sleep. I guess it might have been an hour or so after dawn, when I was woke by a curious screechy sort of a noise. As soon as I got my ears under weigh, I found it panned out something like, “Bedad! ye divils, begorra, be aisy, bejabbers!”--seemed kind of Irish. I rolled over from sleeping inland, and, by the holy poker, within fifty yards of where we had slept, washed up high and dry by the tide, which had turned in the night and was then about full, was a barr’l with a head on it, and out of that head was just pouring the thickest kind of Irish. A man could see that the inside of that barr’l was yearning to have some sort of consideration paid to it. I roused up Torin, and we went down quietly, and inspected the cask from behind. It was a very nice barr’l--a butter barr’l--and I judge about a third full of butter, and may be two-thirds full of Kinjan; and the funny thing was that the poor coon had been washed up stuck fast in that barr’l with his head turned out to sea, so as he couldn’t suspicion we were around, and he was waltzing into creation with the finest language, and the air was real stiff with cussing. Well, I guess we laughed some, though we were tarnation glad to see him,--that is, I laughed, and Torin stood there stroking his beard, with the nearest approach to a grin I ever saw on him. The laughing just drove Kinjan mad, and he wrenched round with a mighty wriggle, and when he saw us he fairly surpassed himself, cussing us up and down, beginning with our boot laces--which were mighty scarce, by the way. His remarks were not worth repeating.

‘When he had dried up, owing to a trickle of butter dripping from his head into his mouth,--he was buttery all over,--Torin said, “Got any bread with you?” That set him off again, but he toned down mighty quick, and ended up by saying quite quietly:

‘“Take me out of this, and be d----d to ye, ye leather-headed sons of bottle-washers!” and then he fainted. So we took him out, and hung him over the cask, and sluiced water over him, and presently he came to, ca’m, but pretty yallow.

‘’Pears when the ship struck, he’d been jerked off the poop right into this butter barr’l, which was standing open and most empty on the lower deck. When he felt the ship disappearing under him, being an Irishman, and a genius, with a turn for expurriment,--but I guess mainly because he couldn’t swim,--he calculated to stay where he was. He grabbed a bit of wood that came along, and by means of this managed to keep the barr’l top side up, the sea luckily being as ca’m as a mill-pond. He said he was first taken out maybe hundred of miles till he could most smell the Canaries, and then brought in again on the turning tide and washed up. In his struggles near shore, he’d kicked clean through the bottom of the cask, and, getting his leg jammed tight through the hole, was as fast as a tick when we found him. He had a down on butter afterwards; he never ’peared to go much on it, ’slong as I knew him.’

Over Mr Denver’s face, which had hitherto been as unmoved and expressionless as carved mahogany, twinkled a fleeting look of joy, which disappeared with the next puff of his cigar.

‘That was not the most amusing day I _have_ spent,’ he went on, meditatively; ‘we kept mighty busy looking for fixings and finding none to speak of; I guess the current must have appropriated all that was useful in the old tub,--only the most or’nery articles came along--empty hencoops, and barr’ls, and such like--not a single tarnation thing to eat or drink. I judge the skipper and most of the crew turned up their toes, though I heard afterwards that four of them were saved out of a small boat by a passing vessel. Torin got a piece of sail-cloth, and made himself a pinafore, which comforted him some. Kinjan slept most of the day, and when he woke up, he told us we were fools, and that what we wanted instead of mooning around for things from the sea, was to go inland and find out if there weren’t any houses or cities in the vicinity; and then he rolled himself up tight in the shade of that sand-heap like a darned yellow dormouse, and went to sleep again; I guess he must have had a most amazing wide-awake time in that barr’l, I never saw a man sleep so. Torin and I were most powerfully hungry and thirsty by this, so we went inland a piece and looked about us for the highest ground we could find,--the country was as blamed flat, mind you, as this prairie. We found a sand hillock that rose a bit above the rest of the ground, and Torin made a back and said “get up;” so I got, and stood on his shoulders, and looked; and presently out of the distance away to the south-east, it might have been five or six miles, I could see some white spikey things seeming to stick up out of the yallow horizon. I told Torin, and he got up on me, and when he came down--which he did pretty smart, owing to my balance going wrong--he cursed gently, with his mouth full of sand, and said, “Minarets, city!”

‘Well, we went back to Kinjan, who was awake, for a wonder, and told him; and then he said he’d just remembered the whole country round those parts was in the hands of the rebels, and that if we were seen we should be killed, so he recommended us to go on hunting along shore, till we ran across a boat, and get away in that, and he recommended us particularly to look out for a barr’l of whisky; then he went to sleep again. Well, we just sat down, and waited for him to get thirsty, calculating that when that was so, being an Irishman, he would find us a way out of the fix. And presently he got, and it woke him up, and after cursing a bit, he sat up quite spry--but a piece yallow still--and figured out the most beautiful plan of how we would go and take that city if necessary, and make them provide us with an escort down to Mogador. Then he said it was no good doing anything till it was cool and dark. So he lay down again and went to sleep; and after one more look along shore we lay down alongside and did the same, meaning to start with the dawn next morning for the city. I reckon we were played out that evening, and felt real rocky and dispurited.’

Dick Denver’s memories of that thirsty day were here too much for him; he rose and called again for drinks across the platform. When they had come, in the hands of a sleepy and coloured individual, he finished a whisky and soda at a single draught, and resumed.

‘That fellow was infectious, I guess; anyway I slept until a heavy sort of feeling about my chest woke me, and I found a great hairy nigger cuss had taken me for an arm-chair. All around us in the moonlight were a lot of ferocious-looking devils in long robes and turbans, armed to the teeth. Torin was lying spread-eagled on my right--he didn’t ’pear to be discommoded--but he spat out a broken tooth, and I heard him mutter to himself, “You fools, much better have killed me, and have done with it;” and I judged he was powerfully divided between two sorts of wish.

‘There was a nigger holding on to each of my arms and legs, so I took it quietly, and they bound me up like an eternal mummy. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kinjan’s face shining round and red in the middle of a mass of niggers. He rolled his eye at me, and began, “Be aisy, Dick--Begad! I’ll take tay with ye prisintly, ye hairy haythens!” Just then one of the niggers stuffed his mouth with sand, so he shut his head kind of sudden. Then they picketed their horses round us, and sat on their haunches, and pow-wowed everlastingly.

‘I judged we were in the hands of a band of rebel Moors loafing along shore in search of wreckage; and a man could see with half an eye it was a tight place. I wasn’t more than six feet from Kinjan, and I could tell by the prick of his ears he was understanding the pow-wow; living as he did at “Gib,” he’d been a lot in the country and _sabed_ the lingo well. Lie low was the only game, and I lay and thunk a lot, but all the time I felt kind of certain that if we were coming out of that place, it was Kinjan’s show--and the more so because I knew he was almighty dry. Their chief seemed a venerable kind of a bug, with a long white beard and turban, and he did most of the pow-wowing. Presently they easied off, and after looking us over well, and giving us a kick or two, set two sentinels, and turned in for sleep. The sentries stood out about twenty yards; and when the others seemed fixed pretty quiet, Kinjan gave a gentle roll of his fat carcase towards me, and said, out of his back teeth (I can’t give his accent, but it was real rich): “Thanks be to Jasus, one of me knots is a granny. Praise the pigs, I’ll be out of ut in ten minutes. Tell Torin; and when I give ye the wink, stand by, and I’ll cut ye loose--then grab what ye can and clear the camp; whist!” One of the sentries faced round right there and came towards us; he prodded at me with the butt end of his lance to see that I couldn’t move when he tickled me, and he rolled Kinjan over with his foot; we neither of us budged, so he concluded we were fixed, and mouched back again.

‘I counted the gang; there were fifteen of them. Torin was laying very low about three yards away, but I judged from a sign he made when the sentry vamoosed, that he knew things were about to progress. After what seemed a ’nation long time, Kinjan raised his head, and I saw from his movements he’d succeeded in freeing his hands; presently he came rolling gently on to me, and I felt the point of his blamed knife going in as he cut the thongs; then he handed me the knife, and I rolled on to Torin and hacked him loose; and just as I got through, one of the sentries tumbled to it, and came for us like greased lightning. I saw Kinjan throw out his arm from the ground, and the cuss tripped right over it on to us, and his spear went into the ground through my coat.

‘Kinjan raised a whoop, and got that spear and ran it through the man next him--he was a bloodthirsty little cuss. I laid for the sentry’s pistols--he had two--and drew a very neat bead on the other sentry.

‘Torin he just sat up and purred, and then when the devils began to come on, he took that fallen sentry by the legs, and got a wiggle on him, and went for them into the thick; and he swung the poor devil round and round and cleared that crowd like fury--’peared they didn’t understand the game. He laid out three of them, and then they scattered and drew back; I dropped another with the other pistol, and Kinjan charged right down on the old chief, and bowled him over with the butt-end of his spear. “’Tis all over, bhoys,” he said, and sat on the old gentleman; and so it was. When they saw the tail-ends of their boss waving in the air, the rest of them made tracks. In the intervals of sticking the business end of his spear into things, Kinjan had cut loose all their horses but four or five, and there was a beautiful scrimmage over those sand hillocks, men and horses all mixed, and travelling in most directions like fury. That was a vūrry tidy dodge of Torin’s,--maybe it was rough on the sentry, but it was vūrry impressive--some of the impressions might have been a foot long, I should judge.’ He paused; the train had stopped with a jerk at a station, and the engine was blowing off steam with a disturbing energy.

‘Durn the durned thing,’ said Mr Denver; but presently he resumed, as we droned on again.

‘We--ell,’ and there was an alarming touch of boredom in his tone, ‘after we’d tied the old boy, we had a quiet time, doctoring up those we’d stretched, as best we could, and figuring out what was to be done. Kinjan and I palavered over the chances, but Torin didn’t seem to care what we did, and seemed sort of disgusted with the whole affair. He stood leaning on a spear by the horses, and once I heard him mutter, “Damn! shan’t get such a chance again.” I judged he would have let himself be killed like a sheep, but the fighting instinct was too strong for him; he was as sulky as he could be, but he did what he was told, which was the main thing. I was for riding along the coast and trying to make Mogador, but Kinjan over-persuaded me that a bold course was the best thing; he wanted to go right there for the city. “We’ve got the weapons, clothes, horses, and a goide, but we’ve got nothing to dhrink,” he said, “and ut would be unbecomin’ of us if we lift the neighbourhood without dhroppin’ a cyard.” He took great pleasure in dressing us up in clothes taken from the deceased, and fussed around like a seven-year-old going to a party--the little devil had lots of sand; he said the great thing was to get _into_ the city, and to do that we must throw in plenty of style.

‘At last we got rigged out and mounted; I guess we made pretty fair heathens, all except Kinjan--he was too red and fat. He tied the old chief’s hands and his feet under his horse, and make him go first. I came next with a shooting-iron handy, and the other two brought up the rear. After a stretch, Kinjan rode up alongside the old gentleman, and began to blandhander to him in his own tongue, and presently he made me a sign, and then cut the ropes that bound his feet, and the old boy perked up, and began to spread himself; and by the time we came within sight of the town, those two were as thick as thieves. I judge Kinjan would have made a fine poker-player,’ said Mr Denver in parentheses, with a sigh of regret.