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Wild Honey: Stories of South Africa

by Cynthia Stockley · English · Gutenberg #37259 · 463,828 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Wild Honey: Stories of South Africa

Author: Cynthia Stockley


        
Release date: August 29, 2011 [eBook #37259]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37259

Credits: Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILD HONEY: STORIES OF SOUTH AFRICA ***




Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




Wild Honey
Stories of South Africa
By Cynthia Stockley
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
This edition dated 1914.

Wild Honey, by Cynthia Stockley.

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________
WILD HONEY, BY CYNTHIA STOCKLEY.

CHAPTER ONE.

WILD HONEY--PART I.

It was a six-mule mail-coach that bumped and banged along the rough
highroad to Buluwayo, and Vivienne Carlton anathematised the fate that
condemned her to travel by it.  Cordially she detested the cheerful
garrulity of certain of her fellow-passengers, quoting to herself Louis
Vance's satirical _mot: "A_ pessimist is a person who has to live with
optimists."  Gladly would she have slain the optimists with whom she was
so tightly packed in the hooded body of the cart--for the term "coach"
was merely a polite fiction: the affair was neither more nor less than a
two-seated Cape cart, with the hood thrown back so that the mules might
find the pulling easier and the passengers be more effectively grilled.

Two passengers shared the front seat with the driver.  Miss Carlton was
wedged in the back seat between a perspiring Cape Colonial and a tall
lithe man with a deeply tanned complexion and careless light grey eyes,
who was as taciturn as herself.  No one looking at her sitting there so
composedly, closely veiled and gloved, violet eyes quietly fixed on the
horizon, her tall khaki-clad figure preserving in spite of its
contiguity with strangers an air of dainty aloofness, would have guessed
her frame of mind.  Her companions had her marked down as an English
girl whose beauty and breeding warranted her to put on as much "side" as
she liked, and in this they were not very far from the truth.  They were
also certain that she was the daughter of a lord, and wondered how she
came to be travelling alone.  The Colonial and the man who came from
Kimberley admired her madly without daring to address a word to her; the
showy blonde who was going up to be a barmaid in Salisbury, would have
given the necklace of diamonds she wore for its safety under her cotton
blouse, to possess that aloof manner and gift of remaining silent
without being offensive.  Only the third man with his careless glance
that took in every point of the changing scene of bush, and tree, and
kop, had any notion of what was going on behind the composed lovely face
of the girl next to him.  And the reason he knew was that though he
looked like a pirate or a Klondike miner, or anything that was reckless
and disreputable he was really of the same world as herself, and could
very well guess how the discomfort and hateful intimacy of
coach-travelling outraged her.  But even he was far from guessing at the
hopeless fury, and bitter disdain of her surroundings and the world in
general that was rankling in the heart so close to him that he could
almost feel its beating.

Vivienne Carlton's hand was against all men as she believed all women's
to be against her; but she had learned to conceal the fact well.  Not by
brandishing her scorn and detestation of it could she hope to get back
her own from a world that had treated her badly.  Two years of
struggling for a living in the ranks of journalism had taught her
nothing if it had not taught her this!

Ah! what a two years!  Instead of enjoying the brilliant peace of the
land about her, she was thinking of them now, turning her eyes inward to
memories that were poisoning her life.  Two years of outward kow-towing
to those who had once kow-towed to her, of being cut and ignored by
people who when she was heiress to great estates and an ancient name
would have petted and fawned upon her, had not the natural haughtiness
of her nature rebuffed them.  They remembered those rebuffs when the
tide of her family's prosperity turned, and the great law case that had
dragged on wearily for many months came to an end with the verdict that
disinherited her father and gave to an Australian cad all that Vivienne
had been taught from her birth to consider irrefragably hers.  Well had
her haughtiness been remembered against her in that hour!  It seemed as
though all fashionable society had been poised expectant, stones and
javelins in hand, waiting for the fall of the house of Giffard-Carlton.
Sir Gerald, her gentle, chivalrous father, had not long survived the
loss of his title and position, but Vivienne and her mother of the same
spirit, proud and defiant in adversity, bore the brunt of society's
malignant glee with unbowed heads, contemptuously refusing the charity
of the usurper, and the humiliating favours of so-called friends.  They
were obliged to step down from their high places, but they did it with
dignity, and might with dignity have retired into obscurity and been
forgotten by society, like many another before them, but for the fact
that of all her gifts the only one Vivienne could turn to account was
the gift of description and charming phrase which soon gave her a place
and a living in the world of journalism.  And in that connection she
came into constant touch with the world of society.  For she had been
obliged of course to begin at the very beginning, penny-a-lining reports
of balls and receptions, descriptions of weddings and the gowns of
debutantes.  It was at such work that so much that was wounding and
embittering had come her way.  Many a cruel insult had she been obliged
to swallow for her guinea a column.  Many an old score cherished by _les
nouveaux riches_ against the house of Giffard-Carlton had been paid into
the account of the lady journalist!  And the result of it all was a
nature incalculably embittered and corroded.  Though she was only
twenty-two, Vivienne did not feel like a girl any longer, but she still
looked like a girl, and a very charming one at that.  The fact was one
she meant to use as a weapon in her reprisals against a world that had
mishandled her.  Her gift of writing was a weapon that enabled her to
beat a living for herself and her mother out of life, but her beauty was
a far more potent one, and she meant to use it to the hilt as a means of
getting back her own from society.  This work she had come out to Africa
to do for the _Daily Flag_--a series of articles descriptive of the
life, inhabitants, and prospects of Cecil Rhodes's country--would, she
hoped, prove to be a means to a very special end.  If her articles made
a big hit she would not have to go back to describing ball gowns.  But
she did not mean to return to journalism at all if she could help it.
There were plenty of millionaires in Africa--and she had plenty to give
in exchange for the millions of one of them--youth, beauty, birth,
breeding, an intimate knowledge of the social world!  There was only one
thing he must not ask of her, and that was a heart.  She might be
tempted to reveal to him what she carried instead--a husk with a little
brown dust in it, like a rotten nut!  To cry to him as Baudelaire cried
in his bitterness:

"My heart?--the beasts have eaten it!"

She had little fear of being unable to gain her end.  Many men had
proposed to her since she became simple Miss Carlton, but none of them
had been able to offer enough in exchange for the rotten nut.  The man
destined to receive that precious gift must be very rich indeed, must
have enough to buy back what the world had robbed her of--place, and
power to put her foot on the necks of those who had humiliated her.
There were many such in Africa.  Even during her short stay in Cape
Town, she had met one who showed himself as heartily disposed as he was
well-equipped to shoulder his side of the bargain.  Only for a foolish
and incomprehensible shrinking on her part at the last moment, she would
now have been engaged to marry Wolfe Montague, one of Johannesberg's
great financial kings.

However!  She was to see him again in a month or two in Rhodesia and
doubtless by that time she would be rid of all foolish prejudices.  This
charming coach journey was one of the things that would help her to come
to a propitious decision!  At the thought, she gave a little cynical
laugh that made her companions stare, wondering what she found in the
scenery to amuse her.

Indeed, nothing less amusing than this journey could be imagined.  Day
after day of weary crawling across a landscape that changed unceasingly
in outline, though never in detail.  Always the undulating grassy slopes
dotted with bush, the eternal kopje ahead, and the eternal kopje left
behind.  There was something terrible about the brooding loneliness, the
eloquent stillness, the great unending sameness of it all.

They had been travelling for four nights and days and must continue for
a good many more yet before the end was reached--sometimes putting up
for a night at a rough wayside hotel, more often just outspanning beside
a mule stable during the darkest hours and sleeping as best they could
in the cramped cart, with rugs and mail-bags as a common couch.
Vivienne had never imagined such physical discomfort possible, and
though her body was too strong to suffer by it, her mind was sick, and
her whole being revolted at the sordidness of it all.  Sleeping side by
side with strange men, and a common woman, wedged against them,
listening to their snores!  Wakening in the morning to the intimacy of
their unkempt faces!  Eating and drinking in their company, listening to
their eternal talk!

Thank Heaven! to-night at least was to be spent at a hotel.  Even the
others who were seasoned coach-travellers congratulated themselves on
that fact, not so much because there would be beds to sleep in, as
because an obvious storm was brewing.  The sunlight had gone suddenly,
and black clouds, lined with pallid green, were grouping in the west,
taking the form of a great monster with brooding wings.  Now and then a
quiver of lightning passed across the sky, and a large drop of rain
splashed down into the coach.

On rounding a kopje, they came suddenly upon Palapye, the native village
where the night was to be spent.  It was the kraal of Khama, king of the
Bechuana tribe--hundreds of straw thatched huts sprawling up a hill and
across the plain!

Vivienne, since she left Pretoria, had seen many such "hotels" as the
one by which the coach now drew up: a square wattle-and-daub affair with
a number of smaller huts scattered around it.  Painfully she clambered
down, and with the others followed the worn woman who kept the place to
one of these small huts which were the guest rooms.  For once there were
enough to go round, and no one was obliged to share.  That was something
to be thankful for in an odious world!

After she had washed some of the dust from her face and hands and
removed a great deal more from her dark curly hair, which she wore
boy-fashion--short, and parted on one side--Vivienne went and sat by her
hut door to get a little air.  The storm had not yet broken, and with
the thermometer at anything over a hundred, the heat was almost
unbearable.  Immediately, she became aware of another woman, sitting in
the doorway of a hut opposite--a stone-still woman, whose face, shadowed
by a dark print sunbonnet was pallid as a bone, with sunken eyes staring
absorbedly before her into nothingness.  In the listless hands hanging
over her knees, she held a child's little torn shabby straw hat.

After one glance, Vivienne in spite of the heat felt a shiver creep over
her, and presently in the silence, knowledge came to her that she was in
the presence of tragedy.  Something terrible was going on behind those
fixed, absorbed eyes, some sorrow too deep for words was brooding with
bowed head in the mind of that silent watcher.  The girl felt the heart
quiver in her breast--that heart she supposed the beasts had eaten!  And
she longed to put out a hand or speak a word of comfort to the woman.
But she had lost the habit of saying sympathetic things and it is one
that cannot be regained in a moment.  The best she could do was to
quietly withdraw from the presence of grief, and stay in the back of her
hut until the hotel-woman came to call her for dinner.

In the square hut, the other passengers were gathered round the usual
meal: goat chops, potatoes, a steaming dish of green mealies boiled on
the cob.  Vivienne took her place with her habitual aloof composure,
paying little attention to the general conversation until a question
addressed by the barmaid to the hotel-keeper roused her interest.

"In the name of goodness, what's wrong with that woman I saw sitting
inside one of the huts?"

The hotel-keeper made a hopeless gesture with her shoulders.

"_Ach_!  Don't ask me, it's too awful!  Her _kindt_ is lost in the
bush."

"My God!" said the Kimberley man abruptly, and his mealie cob fell into
his plate.

"Yes," continued the woman.  "Only three and a half years old, and one
minute playing round the waggon in the sight of her pa and ma, and the
next minute... _gone_!  That was four days ago, and they never seen her
since."  She added in a low voice, "Nor never will!"

"But what happened?" stammered Vivienne startled out of her reserve.

"Goodness knows, Miss...  She just wandered out of sight behind a bush,
I suppose, and then--all bushes look alike!  You can get lost in three
minutes on the veld.  Just think of that _arme kind_ tumbling along,
falling, and sobbing, and wondering why her ma didn't come.  And they
hunting like mad things for her!  The father's gone cracked as a
Hottentot, and still goes on hunting; but _she_ can't stand on her feet
any more, and they brought her in here to-day for me to mind."

Vivienne thought it the most appalling thing she had ever heard.  Her
soul was sick within her.  She could eat nothing.  She would have left
the hut, but the storm had broken with a roar and a flash, and outside
the rain was swishing down.  She was obliged to sit still and hear more
of this story which paralysed her with terror and pity.  A love of
little children is a very inconvenient possession for a woman who means
to beat the world at its own heartless game!

"They found the kid's hat next day, more than twenty miles from where
they lost her.  Think of it!  A child of that age wandering twenty
miles!"

"She ran of course," said the light-eyed man briefly.  "They always
run."

"Or perhaps... you never know... a Hon--"

"Oh, _don't_!"  Vivienne cried out suddenly, and put her hand over her
eyes.  The others stared at her moodily, and the subject dropped.  But
presently the Kimberley man asked the Colonial if he had ever heard of
the fellow who was lost from the Pioneer Column?

"Ya!" said the Colonial.  "Seen him often in Buluwayo.  He's got a queer
look in his eye and I don't wonder.  Forty days before he found the
Column again--long after they had given him up.  And he could never tell
a thing he did in those forty days."

"They never can.  A fellow I knew in the B.B.P. got lost out from Tuli
one time.  And when they found him again, all his front teeth were gone.
He couldn't remember how it happened.  But of course it was lying on
the ground gnawing roots did it."

The barmaid leaned on her elbows, eagerly interested; but Vivienne,
white-lipped, listened because she must.

"The great thing is not to lose your head," said the Kimberley man,
pleasantly conversational.  "I've known lots of fellows who've been
lost, and they all agree that the first instinct when you realise you're
lost is to start running.  Just run and run till you drop.  Then the
madness gets you, and you begin to tear off your clothes and pitch them
in every direction as you run.  Nearly every fellow ever found after
being lost is stark naked--begging your pardon, Miss," he added as his
eye fell upon Vivienne.  She took no notice.  The rain had stopped, and
she fled before she should hear more horrors.

But that night she could not sleep for thinking of the lost little
child, and its desolate mother.  The storm commenced again, and raged
round the hut.  Lightning streaked through the canvas windows and rain
lashed the earth.  She was still wide-eyed on a tear-wet pillow when the
hotel-keeper banged the door to say that the coach would start in twenty
minutes.

The first thing she noticed as they clambered to their places was that
the light-eyed man was missing.  She was far too distant to make any
remark, but the others with a kind of road-fellowship that surprised her
refused to let the coach start until some explanation was forthcoming.
The driver, a ferocious looking half-caste, scowled at them.

"_Ach_!  He's gone off on some business of his own if you want to
know... and coming on by de next coach.  _Now_ will you stop wasting de
Company's time and let me drive my mules?"

So on they went through the fresh dawn.  The rain-washed land gave up a
delicious perfume of drenched leaves and growing things, and a scent of
mimosa blew like a caress against the cheeks of the weary travellers.
The sky was a bride in shroudy veils of pale pink that warmed to rose,
until the great spiked sun shot up from behind the horizon, and took her
in a glittering embrace.  Then brazen day was on them once more.

They slept in the coach that night, and got little ease of it.  All were
thankful enough when next mid-day found them outspanned for an hour or
two beside a mule stable.  The driver made a fire, and the passengers
unpacked their baskets.  Vivienne was sick to death of tinned food, but
glad to accept a cup of tea made in the kettle.  Afterwards she strolled
away to an open pool not far off, while the others snatched the chance
of an hour's sleep in the shadow of the stable.

The little pool or "pan" of water lay glittering in the sunshine and she
sat beside it under a tree shaped like a candelabra with great scarlet
and yellow flowers rising in flames from its branches.  She was too
careful of her complexion to attempt to wash in such torrid heat, but
she did not mind her hands getting slightly sunburnt for the pleasure of
laving them in the tepid water.  Presently a charming little creature of
the squirrel tribe came out of a bush and looked at her with bright
eyes.  She took a pellet of chocolate from inside her camera case and
held it out invitingly, but the tiny creature backed a little, then sat
up on its hind legs and cocked its head at her.  She took out her camera
and tried to snap it, but it ran again just at the critical moment.  The
same thing happened two or three times, until she got a good picture.
Then she tried once more to beguile it with the chocolate.  But whenever
she got close, it bounded away.  At last, she gave up, and was suddenly
astonished to find how far she had come from her pool.  Glittering there
through the trees it appeared to be quite a quarter of a mile away.  Yet
that seemed scarcely possible.

"How silly of me!" she murmured.  "This is just the way people get lost
I expect," and at the thought she noticed a distinct inclination in her
feet to hurry, but did not permit them any such foolishness.

"Don't be silly," she repeated to herself.  "What are you afraid of?
There is the pool straight in front of you, and as soon as you reach it
you will see the coach."

So she forced herself to walk calmly, and all the time she marvelled at
the distance she had come just in those few little short runs after the
squirrel.  And when she got to the pool there was no sign of the coach!

"This is too fantastic!" she exclaimed, and laughed aloud.  But her
laugh had such a strange sound that she thought it was some one else's
and turned round violently to see who was there.  Then she drew nearer
the pool, and saw that the tree growing by it was a smaller one than the
one she had sat under, and had fewer flowers.  At last she realised it
was a different pool.  But there was no other in sight!  Her heart came
up into her throat.

"I must go back the way I came," she told herself steadily.  "When I get
to where I first saw this pool I shall not be far off the original one.
It was probably behind my back all the time, and if I had turned round I
should have seen it!"

So with her nerves well in hand she began to walk back the way she had
come.  She could not keep quite straight, on account of the trees dotted
about everywhere, each the exact image of the other, and she kept
turning round because for some reason she could not bear to lose sight
of one pool before she regained the other.  Suddenly far off she spied
the gleam of water through trees, and at once she frankly hurried,
telling herself she had been away long enough from the coach and that
the driver would be waiting to start.  Her last few steps were very
swift.  She was breathing quite heavily when she reached the pool and
glanced round keenly for the coach.  It was gone!  What was more the
stable was gone too!  She gave a wild cry.  Her knees weakened under her
and she found herself sitting down.

Presently regaining her courage she got up and looked about her
critically.  It was then she saw that there was no candelabra tree by
this pool.  That shook her a little.

"Better call out," was her next thought, and she followed it up by a
shout that sounded absurdly like a baby crying from a pin-prick.  She
was reminded of the little lost child, and began to tremble in spite of
herself.  "I'll get out into the open," she thought.  "There are too
many trees here.  They shut in my voice."

She moved a little way off and called.  Then again she walked on and
called.  Mechanically she found herself moving along, calling as she
went.  Her voice seemed to grow weaker every moment, but her steps grew
quicker.  At last, she began to run.

Something tickled her face, and lazily, for she was very tired, and
there was a rushing noise in her ears, she put up her hand to brush the
irritation away.  Then her hand tickled too.  She held it before her
eyes and saw that it was covered with little black ants.  At that, her
aversion to creeping things galvanised her into movement, and she sprang
up, frantically brushing scores of ants from her face and hands.  It was
then she realised that she had been lying face downwards on the ground.
She must have fallen, and lain where she fell.  How long ago that was
she had no idea, but the sun was very low.  She could see it in the
reddened skies just behind some trees.

The next discovery she made was a still stranger one.  When she set out
on her journey she had been dressed in a suit of khaki-coloured duck,
made in three pieces; a Norfolk coat, a short deerstalker skirt that
could be unhooked and taken off like a modern riding-habit, and,
underneath, a serviceable pair of riding-breeches of the same material.
These were met at the knees by leather gaiters.  Stout brown shoes, and
a dark silk shirt completed the suit, the whole having been designed and
beautifully made by a well-known man in Bond Street; for with her mental
eyes fixed on millionaires, Miss Carlton had not thought it wise to be
economical in the direction of clothes.  She now discovered herself to
be attired only in the silk shirt and riding-breeches.  Her boots and
gaiters were scratched and worn almost beyond recognition; her hat,
coat, skirt, and camera were gone.  She had absolutely no idea how she
had lost them, but some faint notion of searching for them made her look
in the direction of the sun to see how long it would be before she was
left in the dark.  Then she observed another amazing thing.  Instead of
disappearing the sun had actually risen above the trees, and was
advancing into the sky.  The world was full of surprises.  It was
morning!

She had spent a night alone on the veld then!  It seemed strange that
she could remember nothing about this, but somehow the fact did not
worry her very much.  She felt indeed extraordinarily calm and careless.
A sense of lightness and freedom pervaded her.  She would not have
minded anything if only she had not been so horribly tired.  Also hungry
and thirsty.

She began to saunter forward in a casual sort of way, and presently
noticed that the rushing sound grew louder, and was not in her head at
all, but in the air.  There was a river close at hand, and she was
making straight for it!  This pleased her greatly, and when she came in
sight of it she laughed joyously.  It was fringed with trees, thick and
tall, and the banks were high, but she had no difficulty in clambering
down into the riverbed which was wide as Piccadilly Circus, and mostly
composed of pure white sand and flat rocks.  The stream in the middle
which made so much noise was comparatively shallow and she could easily
have forded it.  What she did, however, was to lie down flat beside it
and drink long and deep.  At the same time, she experienced the
sensation of having performed this act before.

"But one always has that feeling every time one does anything new!" she
thought.  Her face reflected in the water looked very dark, and her
hands were burnt almost black--covered with scratches too.  That did not
trouble her much.  Her eye was ranging round the trees for something to
eat.  In a minute, she spied something yellow that might be fruit.
While she was climbing up amongst the rough branches and foliage, adding
considerably to her stock of scratches, she again had the sensation of
having done this thing before.  They were only sour plums, and she
didn't care much for sour things, but the peel was not bad.  Later she
found some wild apricots.  There were also little flower bulbs sticking
above the ground, with rushes attached to them, and of these she pulled
a number.  Some that had an oniony flavour she discarded, but others
tasted as she knew they would, just like nuts.  Munching placidly, she
wandered on her way.  The rushing sound of the river was pleasant
company.

As she sauntered along, her glance struck something on the ground that
was certainly foreign to the surroundings--nothing less than the remains
of a large canvas sack.  Having slept for many nights upon mail-bags,
she was in a position to recognise one when she saw it, besides, round
this one were scattered the remains of many letters, torn, ant-eaten,
and rotted by rain.  Musingly, she lifted up the tattered canvas and
examined it.  There were sharp teeth marks on it, and it had been ripped
savagely open from end to end.  Yet, coyly hiding in a tarry fold, there
remained some residue of what had evidently once been a full bag of
mail--on Her Majesty's Service--a stamped and addressed letter, and a
newspaper.  The ants had chewed both a little, but the canvas had kept
them in good condition.  Vivienne examined them with interest, and it
being at this time full noon, the pleasant idea occurred to her of
having a little rest, and a little read.  Accordingly she seated herself
and opened the newspaper.

It was the Buluwayo _Chronicle_ dated October the 21st (the date she had
landed in Cape Town) and addressed to a lady in Devonshire who would
never now receive it.  The contents did not interest Vivienne.  The
local news of a town she had never seen would scarcely be likely to do
so.  She threw it aside and took up the letter.  For a moment she looked
at the blurred address:

  George Brain, Esqr.,
  Mining Hotel,
  Beaconsfield,
  Diamond Fields.
  (Barkly West.)

Then as if it were the most natural thing in the world to open other
people's letters, she slipped her fingers under the flap of the
envelope, pulled it off and threw it away.  Unfolding the letter, she
read it from beginning to end.

  "Onder-koppies" near Buluwayo.

  October 20th, 19--.

  Dear George,

  As soon as you get this, raise 500 pounds on the nail, and wire it up.
  I know money is tight, but get that pony from somewhere and your pile
  is made.  Hunt and I have struck it rich.  As a farming partner Hunt
  is no more good than a dead dog, but he knows the surveying and
  mineralogy business like his A.B.C.  On the Rand, they used to call
  him the fellow with a nose for reef, and only he's lazy as the devil
  he'd be rich as Hades by now.  Anyway prowling round here he has nosed
  out a plum_... the land adjoining ours is lousy with gold_.
  Unfortunately the whole 6000 acres belong to de Windt--you know--the
  hunter and explorer fellow, who got this farm for his share in the
  Matabeleland row.  However he's never done anything with it except
  stick up a hut, and it's common knowledge here that he'll take what he
  can get for his land, for since the railway is on its way he professes
  himself sick of this country and is going to make tracks further
  north.  He's got no money, never has, and will jump at 500 pounds
  ready cash, so hustle and raise it George, and we'll keep the loot in
  the family.  Hunt and I haven't a rap between us, and no means of
  getting any except by selling our land, which would look fishy to de
  Windt who is no fool.  You can trust me there's no mistake.  Hunt is
  too wise a bird for that.  But if you've any doubts, come up yourself
  and bring the best surveyor on the Fields.  You'll find that
  everything is O.K.  Only it must be done sharp,--for de Windt will be
  up here on his way North about end November.  Get busy.  _Zachabona_!

  Brother Frank.

"Charming fellow, brother Frank!" said Miss Carlton thoughtfully, and
having no pocket, thrust the letter into the front of her silk shirt.
Afterwards she sat shuffling the rags of paper and canvas with the toe
of her shoe, wondering how they had come to this place.  The conclusion
was that the bag must have been dropped from the down-country coach,
though clearly not at this spot, for there was no road.  Probably some
hungry animal had carried it off and torn it open to see what it
contained.  Possibly the coach road was not far off, and by continuing
ahead she would find it.  But she felt a curious indifference on the
subject.  The heat had filled her with a delightful drowsiness, and she
decided to rest a little longer.  With her back against a tree she
stared dreamily at the lovely slope of country over which the sunshine
appeared to be passing in ripples making the long pale grass sway in
waves, though not a breath of wind stirred the air.  Everything seemed
wrapped in a pleasant golden haze, but whether the haze was in her mind
or on the golden silent land about her she could not have told.  At last
her eyes gradually closed and she slept.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

When she awoke the plain was still simmering under the sun waves, and
leaves and grass crackled and stirred as before in the windless air.
All was unchanged, except that at the top of the slope half a quarter of
a mile away, a dozen or more buck were peacefully grazing among the pale
long grass.  Often from the coach Vivienne had seen such herds, and she
knew the great dark creatures, with patches of white gleaming under them
as they moved, to be sable antelope.  Lazily she sat watching their slow
graceful movements, as they fed, never dreaming of the presence of a
human being, though sometimes one or another of them would raise its
head and for a moment seem to listen.

Then in an instant with the flash and crack of sudden doom the scene
changed.  The antelope terror-stricken, were bounding across country and
the girl leaping to her feet stood with eyes dilated and hand on heart.
A gun had been fired and the dark body of one of the buck lay shuddering
where a moment before it had been happily grazing.

Even as she stood staring, the figure of a man came from behind a far
group of bush into the open--a tall hulking figure, in sloppy trousers
belted at the waist, his gun over his shoulder.  He was a long way off,
but he walked straight as a die for the spot where the buck lay, stooped
over it for a minute, then wiped something he held in his hand on the
grass and stuck it back into his belt.  Afterwards he tied a little
strip of white rag onto a bush close by.  He stood for a while looking
after the rest of the herd, now black dots in the distance, then
leisurely started to walk back in the direction he came.  Never once had
he looked towards where Vivienne, motionless as a statue stood in the
shadow of the trees.

As she watched him, his figure momentarily disappeared behind a bush,
and then for the first time immobility passed from her face and figure.
Panic swept over her like a wave.  Uttering short sharp cries, she began
to run after the man, and, as she ran, the remembrance came over her
like the memory of some frightful nightmare how she had run like this
before--on and on and on--over rocks, through bush, in blinding sunshine
and heavy darkness.  And with the remembrance came such terror as lent
wings to her feet--terror of losing sight of this human creature, and
being left once more to the awful loneliness of the veld.

In a few moments she caught up to within thirty yards of the man, but
long before that he had turned round and was watching her, his hat
pushed back above his dark coarse face, his eyes full of astonishment.

"Hi! young fellah--stop that!"

If he had fired off his gun at her the result could not have been more
effective.  She drew up instantly, stopped tearing with both hands at
the collar of her shirt, and stood staring into his eyes, panting
heavily.  He ran a shrewd glance over her.

"Where'd you spring from?" he demanded.  She continued to stare at him.
His voice which was common and brutal troubled her, and she did not like
his face.

"Crazy!" he mused, looking at her keenly through half-closed eyes.  "I'm
not sure it wouldn't be a good thing to give you a crack on the
cocoa-nut and leave you to the _aasvogels_.  You'll only be a darned
nuisance."

She understood very well what he was saying, but somehow it did not
terrify her.  Nothing terrified her except the thought of being left
alone.  He tried her with another question.

"How long you been lost?"

She waved her hand towards the trees that fringed the river bank.  Why
she did this she had not the faintest idea.

"_Ach_!" he exclaimed impatiently, and turned on his heel.  "Come on to
my waggons, you fool."

Without any indignation at his way of addressing her, she fell into step
beside him.  A few paces farther on, two natives bounded into sight,
coming towards the man as though searching for him.  He addressed them
in Kaffir, pointing backwards to where he had left the buck.  They gazed
at Vivienne with impassive faces.  Both parties continued on their way.

At last Vivienne's eyes fell once more upon the broad dusty road, and a
hundred yards or so from it two transport waggons were drawn up and
outspanned.  At the sight of them, and the smouldering fires, and a dog
that jumped up barking, and the smell of newly-baked bread, something in
the girl's breast gave a great throb, and she had speech.

"Since yesterday," she said, answering the question the man had asked
her some twenty minutes past.

"Oh! you've found your tongue have you," said he.  "Since yesterday
what?"

"Lost."

"Lost since yesterday?" he stared at her wonderingly.  "Oh! you're mad,
right enough, young fellah.  The sun's done _your_ business for you.
Here! come and eat."

She was not too mad to understand that at any rate.  There were some
loaves of newly-made dough bread lying on a box, each broken in two to
let the steam out.  Several other boxes were scattered about and the man
motioning her to one handed her half a loaf.  She took it eagerly, and
began to eat at once, almost wolfishly.  When she had finished she
looked longingly at the other loaves.

"No, you don't," said the man, "you've had enough for one go."  He had
called out an order to some young native boys squatting by the fire, and
they now set a tin kettle full of coffee and two beakers before him.  He
handed her one of the beakers full of hot black liquid and she drank
even to the last drop.

"Now," said he, speaking roughly and emphatically as if to a child with
no intelligence.  "What you want is _sleep_.  Go and get up into that
waggon tent, and _sleep_, do you understand?  No use turning in on the
ground for we're going to _trek_ in an hour.  Get off with you now, and
sleep till you burst."  His tone was the tone of a born bully, but the
girl did not resent it.  She climbed on to the waggon-brake as easily as
if she had been doing so all her life.  A rude, but not unclean mattress
surged up to meet her, and she sank into it and slept.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The waggon was moving when she awoke, a delicious slow movement which
softly swung the mattress suspended on a wooden frame across the tent,
from side to side, and was accompanied by strainings and rumblings,
musical creakings as of a ship at sea, but without any of the malaise
incidental to ships, for the level of the mattress was always
maintained.  When the wheels jolted over stones, Vivienne got no more
discomfort of it than a bird snug in its nest.  From the horseshoe
opening of the tent, she could see a light haze of dust rising
perpetually from under the wheels, and through it, the landscape rolling
out and retreating in changing panorama.  Everything was wonderfully
peaceful.  Sometimes she could hear far ahead the crack of a whip, and a
long-drawn-out native cry; then the waggon would lumber more hurriedly
through the dust for a while, only to return to the slow even movement
of serenely pacing oxen.

Lying idly against her pillow, she watched the sun fall swiftly behind a
kop, and the whole land become suffused with orange-coloured light.
Then the silver-green of bush and tree turned black and kopjes were
etched in India ink against the tinted skies.

Her eyes wandered round the tent in which she was lying.  There was
hardly anything in it except the bed, but from the hoops supporting the
canvas various odds and ends of things were hanging; a lantern, a cheap
clock, a small tin-bound square of mirror, several coarse canvas bags,
evidently stuffed with clothes.

"I suppose they belong to the man who found me," she thought, and
instantly recalled the coarse thick-lipped face, the peculiar sneering
way his mouth drew up at one side under the ragged dark moustache, the
sharp half-closed eyes.  She recalled too his brutal way of speaking to
her.  No one had ever spoken to Vivienne Carlton in such a fashion, and
it had impressed itself on her memory.  In fact, it was the only thing
that stood out since she knew she had lost herself by the pool.  The
rest was darkness.

"_Hi!  Young fellah_!"

Her memory began from those words!  But why "young fellah?"  She had
understanding now to marvel at such an address.  Was it because of her
short hair?  The idea inspired her to kneel up on the bed and reach for
the tin-backed mirror.  She peeped in and, at the sight she met there,
almost reeled backwards out of the waggon.  A face which under dirt and
tan was darker than a Hindoo's, scratched cheeks, sunken eyes, lips that
were dried and cracked.  A mop of short curly hair full of dust and bits
of grass and dried leaves!  A neck that was burnt almost black right
down to where it met the ragged shirt collar.  She could not even be
sure that the eyes were her own, so deep were they in her head.

The shock sent her back to her pillow, and she lay there a long time
very still.  But her mind was clear enough now to realise why the man
had mistaken her for a "young fellow."  She was a tall, athletic girl
whose love of outdoor exercises had conformed her figure to a boyish
flexibility and litheness rather than feminine plumpness.  Moreover,
such superfluous flesh as she had once possessed was now gone.  The veld
had turned her into a lanky, dirty, hungry-looking lout of a boy.  She
could not help laughing, but a moment later her face grew stern to
consternation.  The feeling of safety engendered by being once more in
touch with people was dispersing the terror of the veld, but another
horror now took its place!  Her beauty was gone!  The one great wand she
possessed, the pivot round which all her plans revolved.  It would take
months to get back her complexion and contours--if she ever got them
back!

She stared at her dark hands, blistered and torn, with black rims to
them.

"How awful if this ever gets known!"

So far, the world with all its cruelty and malice had never been able to
touch her spotless reputation, or Mrs Grundy heave a brick at her for
outraged conventions.  But now?  If this became known?  Lost on the
veld!  Picked up by a strange man, kept in a waggon, travelling alone
with him on the veld!  What tit-bits to be rolled round the tongues of
her enemies!

"It must never be known," she whispered to herself.  "This man must go
on believing me a boy.  The whole business of my being lost must be kept
dark, and I must get back to my world as soon as I can.  I wonder if
this man is bound for Rhodesia or going down-country!"

Ruefully, she examined her garments.  Her riding-breeches and gaiters,
though dirty and worn, would last a good while yet, but the soles of her
boots were almost gone.

Daylight passed, and was superseded by a great white moon that diffused
mother-of-pearl light.  Hour after hour the waggon rumbled forward, but
at last the wheels creaked over grass and shrub and came to a stop.
There were native cries and shouts, the clatter of falling yokes, the
low moo of tired oxen.  Then newly lighted fires began to crackle and
presently a ravishing odour of meat grilling over embers came stealing
into the waggon tent.  A head showed at the opening.

"Well! how d'you feel now, hey?"

"Better, thank you," she answered politely.  Her voice was a contralto
and quite deep enough to pass for a boy's.

"Oh! better, thank you, hey?" he rudely mimicked.  "Ready for a buck
steak, I bet!"

She did not at all like this man's ways and manners, but it seemed
politic at this time to disguise her feelings.  For one thing, she was
horribly hungry.  For another, she realised that it was in his power to
be intensely disagreeable if she offended him.  Just how disagreeable a
man with such a mouth could be she did not care to contemplate.

"I am certainly very hungry," she answered quietly.

"Come on down, then.  You don't expect me to bring it to you, do you?"

"Of course not!"  She made haste to descend, and take her place before
the packing-case on which the supper was laid.  She thought she had
never tasted anything in her life so delicious as that chunk of
antelope-steak, gritty with cinders, and flavoured with smoke.  At the
end of twenty minutes or so, the man remarked:

"Nothing wrong with your appetite, I see, whatever the sun has done to
your _kop_."

Vivienne did not know what a _kop_ was, but her guessing powers were
unimpaired.

"I'm afraid my behaviour was rather strange when I first met you," she
said stiffly.  "My excuse must be that I am not accustomed to being
lost, and the experience had--er--slightly unbalanced me."

"You were cracked as an over-ripe watermelon," he sneered, "and are
still, for all I know."  He lounged on his elbow, smoking a pipe of
atrocious tobacco.

"At any rate I thank you for your hospitality," said she, longing to box
his ears instead.

"Pugh!  What I want to know is where you come from and whereabouts you
left your party, hey?"

"My party?"

"Yes; the waggons you got lost from."

Something inspired her to leave it at that, and answer quietly:

"Our last stopping-place was Palapye."

"Palapye!  Why, that's ten days' _trek_ from here."

"Oh, no," she said.  "I was at Palapye three days ago--two days before I
lost myself."

"Look here!  Have you any idea of the date you got lost on, hey?"  She
made a rapid calculation.

"But of course, it was the twenty-first of November--yesterday."

"That's all right," he said grimly.  "This is the thirtieth."  She sat
staring at him, lips apart.

"You were lost in the bush nine days, and this is the tenth.  I thought
as much when I saw you."

"Nine days!" she muttered.  "Is it possible!"

Nine days,--alone on the veld--forever unaccounted for!--gone out of her
life.

"Yes, nine days," he repeated grimly.  "I suppose you got rid of most of
your outfit--that's the usual game.  I wonder you have on anything at
all."

She wondered too, remembering the tales she had heard of lost people and
thanked God for the unconscious feminine modesty that had remained to
her even in madness and panic--restraining her from that last horror!  A
warmth crept into her face, but fortunately through the darkness of her
skin the man could see nothing though he was studying her keenly.

"I had a camera--and a hat and coat," she muttered, trying to remember.
"_Ach_!  Shut thinking about it or you'll go off your top again."  She
bit her lip at his rude tone, but it at least had the effect of bracing
her.

"Where were you bound for, hey?"

"Buluwayo."

"Oh, indeed!  We may run into your party then, for I'm bound there too."

She knew that the coach from which she was lost must have reached
Buluwayo long ago, even if they had delayed a day or two looking for
her.  But she did not say so.  The hatefulness of the man made her wish
to keep up as long as possible the fiction of friends close at hand.

"What's your name?" was the next question.  She told him, "Carlton," and
he repeated it contemptuously.

"A beastly swell, of course.  I suppose you lost your eye-glass in the
bush, hey?  Well, Carlton, my fine fellah, just you understand this: If
I've got to board and lodge you from here to Buluwayo or until your fine
friends pick you up, I shall expect to be well paid for it; and don't
you forget it."

"Of course you will be paid," she said coldly.  "But I must ask you in
the meantime to treat me with a little civility--"

He stared at her with sullen eyes.  "Civility be blowed!  And don't you
give me any of your cheek, you young snook, else you'll find yourself in
the wrong box.  Clear out now, I've had enough of you.  You're welcome
to the waggon tent as I never use it,--but don't you come near me again,
except by special invitation."

This was the unpropitious beginning of Miss Carlton's new adventure.
Often during the next two weeks she wondered whether she would not have
been wiser to have stayed in the bush.  The man Roper, as she discovered
his name to be, was an insufferable brute, and she went in mortal terror
of his ever finding out that she was a woman.  He ill-treated his boys
shamefully, thrashing them on the smallest provocation, and never spoke
to Vivienne except in a bullying tone.  What nationality he was she
could not imagine.  From his constant use of such colonialisms as _Ach_!
and _Hey_! he might have been a South African, but his accent was
distinctly English, and he scoffed equally at both British and Boer, and
seemed to have the good qualities of neither.

The one thing to be earnestly thankful for was that he had such a
dislike to her that she was rarely troubled by his society.  He
invariably took his mid-day meal alone, the greater part of the day
being spent in sleep, for like most transport drivers he never slept
during the night _treks_.  The hour of danger for Vivienne was at the
night outspan, for it was then that Roper usually sent her a gruff
message to join him at the meal that was both supper and breakfast in
one--afterwards the whole camp would sink into slumber until nearly
mid-day, except Vivienne who invariably utilised this time to wash and
tidy herself, though she never went far from the waggon, having a horror
of once more losing herself.

Since she must see Roper then, evening was much the best time for the
ordeal.  Flickering firelight and the beams of a waning moon were less
inimical than broad daylight to a role that became daily more difficult
to play.  For Vivienne was beginning to outgrow her disguise!  True, few
people would have recognised in the dirty, if healthy-looking young man
in khaki, the erstwhile lovely debutante of a London Season, and more
recently lady-correspondent of the _Daily Flag_.  But life in the open
with rest and food, were doing their work upon a healthy physique, and
her beauty was rapidly returning.  The heavy sunburn wearing off showed
the skin beneath clear and tinted; her violet eyes had come out of
retreat; her lips no longer cracked were a smooth and healthy red.  Her
hair, for the most part hidden under a primitive hat of plaited grass
made for her by one of the _umfans_ [Young native boys] curled and
glistened in the sun as though it were alive.  It was with increased
anxiety that she looked every day into the tin-backed mirror.

During the long afternoon _treks_, lying in the waggon tent her usual
occupation was the study of a letter she had found inside her blouse
with no clear idea of how it came there.  She wondered if it were
possible that during that extraordinary period of mental aberration she
had deliberately opened the letter of another person, but she preferred
not to believe this.

At any rate, before she had solved the mystery of its origin she knew
the thing off by heart, and now for lack of any better thing to do she
daily pondered the matter of de Windt's farm.  And one day the thought
flashed into her mind.  "If I were to get 500 pounds and buy it instead
of letting those two rogues at Onder-Koppies have it!"  Instantly she
dismissed the question with another--"Is this country utterly
demoralising me?"--reminding herself sharply of who she was, and the
obligations of her birth and honourable training.  But later the thought
came again, and with it extenuating arguments.  After all, would such an
act on her part be any more dishonourable than the one she
contemplated--marrying some man for his money?  The one was no more than
a piece of sharp practice, such as business men did every day of their
lives.  The other--well at any rate it would be a far _pleasanter_ way
to fortune than the other!

Cogitating the matter until it made her head ache, she fell asleep at
last.  It is wonderful how much sleep can be put in on the veld where
the air seems charged with mingled ozone and wine!

At outspan time, which seemed to come earlier than usual, she descended
to Roper's call, and slipped unassumingly into her place.  Everything
seemed much the same, but the moment she glanced at Roper she knew that
something untoward had happened.  The look she had so long dreaded was
in his eye.  _He knew_.

The discovery nearly suffocated her.  She felt her face scorch as if by
a swift flame, then all the blood drain from it, and tighten like a band
round her heart.  Opposite her, dark half-closed eyes full of malice and
some other hateful quality passed over her in a gloating enveloping
stare.  If she had suddenly lost her appetite, so, too, it seemed, had
he.  It was with his eyes he feasted.

Utterly wretched and terrified, hardly knowing what she said, the girl
made some attempt at conversation.  He laughed strangely, answering her
remark with another.

"The mail-coach passed this afternoon, and I had a few minutes' talk
with the driver.  He gave me a bit of news."

"Oh?" she faltered enquiringly, sick with mingled fear and curiosity.
Why, oh why, had not she been awake when that coach passed?

"It appears that a young lady was lost off the coach, week before last--
much about the same place as you were--you didn't happen to meet her I
suppose?" he leered at Vivienne with indescribable malice.  She made no
answer,--only with her hand sheltered her pallid face as best she could
from the gleam of the fire.

"They were out looking for her some time--nearly a week--have given it
up now, though--but all the coach drivers have orders to keep their eyes
open.  They wanted to know if I had seen anything of her?  But of course
I said no."

_Brute_! was what her sick heart cried, though her lips made no sound.
There was a silence.  He leaned on his elbows, smiling his slow evil
smile at her, and she sat perfectly still looking through her fingers at
the fire and the forms of the two _umfans_ beside it, rolled in their
blankets and already sleeping.  No use calling to them, she knew, and
the other boys were away with the oxen.  In any case, all were too much
under the dominion of Roper to stand by her.  She realised that she was
in deadly danger--and alone.  For the first time in the last two years
of proud and bitter defiance, she felt the need of some stronger spirit
than her own, and in her extremity her heart turned to God with a silent
cry for help.

"I forgot to tell you," said Roper softly, "that _her_ name was Carlton,
too.  Isn't that a funny thing now!"

"I don't think so," she found courage to say, though her eyes were the
eyes of a hunted thing.

"No?  Now I thought it the funniest thing I ever heard," said he
laughing softly, "and ever since, I have been saying to myself, `What a
pity it wasn't the young lady I found!'  It would be so pleasant on an
evening like this for instance, to have the society of a nice young
lady!  So very pleasant," he repeated, and leaned on the table looking
into her eyes with some horrible meaning.  "Quite alone on the veld,
with no one to know or care what we did--no one to--interfere--all alone
with love and the daisies."  With a swift movement he caught hold of the
girl's hand which was lying on the table.  But the next instant he had
loosed it and was on his feet.

"Who the devil--"

A man had come into the camp.  Swift-footed and noiseless as a ghost,
neither the dog nor the sleeping _umfans_ had heard his coming.  It was
almost as if he had sprung from a neighbouring bush and Vivienne,
startled as Roper by the sudden apparition, rose to her feet.  But apart
from his quietness, and the gleam of his light clothes, there was
nothing supernatural about the tall lithe shirt-sleeved figure which
with rifle on shoulder and revolver on hip, came into the firelight.
Nothing supernatural either, but something indescribably soothing to the
nerves of Vivienne Carlton in the sound of that cheerful, careless
voice.

"Ah, gentlemen!  Hope I did not startle you?  I'm delighted to come upon
your camp, having mislaid my own by a few miles.  I shall be glad to
spend the night here if you have no objection?"

Roper turned his back and with a sullen scowling face sat down again,
muttering some words that sounded anything but inviting.  The stranger
took no offence.  He also sat down opposite the girl, and began to
relate how he had left his boys and gone after a buck and got too far
away to bother to return that night--and all the time he was looking
steadily across the packing-case at Vivienne and she saw that he
recognised her, even as she recognised him as soon as she saw his light
grey eyes.  It was the silent, tanned man who had left the coach at
Palapye.

CHAPTER TWO.

WILD HONEY--PART II.

The three sat round the fire awhile, unspeaking, each busy with their
own thoughts.  Whatever were Roper's his face grew more sullen every
moment, and the glances he cast in the direction of the new-comer were
full of malignance.  He looked menacingly too at Vivienne, who had
suddenly taken on such a feminine appearance that he was amazed he could
have been deceived so long.  Her intense pallor and the dilation of her
eyes through fear or excitement until they looked like great sombre
pools of fire may have had something to do with the phenomena, but there
she was, spite of the travesty of masculine attire, glowing like some
beautiful night-blooming magnolia.  And she said nothing; just sat very
still behind the packing-case, watching the two men.

As for the stranger, he had taken up an easy position on one of the
boxes which were always lying about the camp, and with his rifle beside
him, leaning forward elbows on knees, began to fill his pipe.  No
hospitality of any kind was offered him.  Just as he was about to light
up, he gave a half glance in the direction of the girl, and for a moment
she was afraid he was going to ask for her permission to smoke, but it
must have been fancy on her part for he lit without speaking.

"I hope your waggons are not far off," said Roper suddenly.  "For I've
no idea of turning mine into a sort of refuge for lost dogs."  His tone
was extremely offensive.  The other man looked at him steadily for a
long moment, then said with a gentleness almost deadly:

"I don't see any dogs about here--except one."  It is true that Roper's
pointer was asleep under the waggon not far off, but the stranger did
not happen to be looking that way.  Roper was at liberty to like the
inference or lump it, whichever he pleased.  Perhaps the cheerful
flicker on the bright barrels of the stranger's .303 helped his decision
not to lump it, for his tone was less aggressive when he spoke again.

"What I mean is, I've had enough of picking up and feeding and lodging
people who choose to get lost on the veld.  I'm full up with it.  I
didn't lay in provisions against such accidents."

"Oh!" said the stranger, still gently.  "Have you had many of the kind?"

"Yes; one too many," was the retort.

Vivienne thought this the time and place to make a statement.  "I am the
unfortunate accident," she said in a low voice.  "I was lost on the veld
some three weeks or more ago, and this man Roper found me, and has been
supplying me ever since with food and a waggon tent to sleep in.  He
seems to resent having to do it so much, however--in spite of my
assurance that he will be well paid--that I should be only too glad to
leave this camp if I could."

This was tantamount to an appeal and she anticipated and hoped that the
stranger would immediately offer her the refuge of his camp.  To her
mortification, he merely looked reflective.

"I see," he said; then casually to Roper: "Well, you needn't worry about
me.  I shall not encroach upon your provisions."

"Very glad to hear it," commented Roper, brusquely.  "As for you, young
fellah," he turned his dark glance on Vivienne, "I don't see what you've
got to complain of.  You have always had civil treatment from me and the
best of whatever was going.  Fine gratitude to turn on me now!"

The girl was silent for a moment, nonplussed by the stranger's
indifference, and the thought that perhaps after all his presence there
was only an accident, that he did not mean to help her, and would go off
to-morrow without a word, leaving her once more in the power of Roper!
She determined that at any rate he should not be in any doubt as to her
position.

"I'm not complaining without cause," she said, looking at Roper
scornfully; "you have repeatedly spoken most insultingly about being
obliged to give me hospitality, and to-night your manner was so
offensive that I was very glad to see this gentleman come into camp."

"Ach! you're a fool to get scared at my jokes.  I've even forgotten what
it was we were talking about.  Whatever it was, I should have thought a
big strapping fellow like you could have taken his own part."

He laughed blusteringly, and she realised that he did not suspect the
other man knew of her identity, and that he meant to keep up the fiction
she herself had begun.  Doubtless, he, too, expected the stranger to be
gone with the dawn before he could make any further discoveries!

It seemed at any rate that there was nothing further to be done for the
moment, or until she could be sure of the man whose name she did not
even know, or whether he knew hers!  After all, had he recognised her?
Had she been mistaken in the meaning of that swift look given her when
their eyes first met, that seemed to say: "All's well!  I am your
friend!"

Surely he must remember her!  Yet what had she done to be remembered by?
Nothing.  She had held herself aloof in disdainful pride from him as
from all the others.  She knew now that she had always felt an interest
in this silent light-eyed man, who never seemed to look at anything but
the horizon, and had felt more instinctively akin to him than the
others.  Still, she had never given any outward sign that he was not, as
Laurence Hope has it, "less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels,"
and had treated him to the same civil disdain with which she froze the
other passengers.  Oh! would he remember it against her now?--if he
remembered her at all!

Her eyes searched his face almost pleadingly; but it told nothing.  He
had crossed his legs easily, and with one hand nursing his elbow, the
other holding his pipe, sat smoking in impenetrable reflection.

Well! it was something to have him here.  His very presence gave her a
feeling of protection.  One of the _umfans_ made a diversion by rising
like a somnambulist from his dreams to throw a great heap of fuel on the
fire.  Mechanically, he performed his task, then, without looking to
east or west, rolled himself to sleep again.

"You keep up your fires all night--here?" remarked the stranger.

"I always keep them up--it gives those brutes something to do," was
Roper's surly response.  "And why not, about here?"

"Oh, it's a good general plan.  But there isn't any particular need
round here.  No lions.  A stray hyena or two is the worst you'll
strike."

"You seem to know all about it," sneered Roper, his straggly moustache
lifted to one side in the usual unlovely manner.

"I ought to.  I helped to make that road."  The stranger slightly
indicated the wide and dusty main track fifty yards off.  Roper gaped a
moment or two.

"Ah! a blessed pioneer!" he said at last, but there was no benediction
in his tone.  "And a mighty rotten road it is," he was presently
inspired to remark.

"Yes," said the stranger placidly, "roads are like dogs--and some men--
they soon go to pot if they are not kept in order."

Roper digested this as best he might, but the process did not appear to
agree with him.

"No one seems to realise that it's nearly one o'clock in the morning,"
he suddenly snarled.  "Get off to bed, youngster."  He added to the
stranger: "If you're going to make tracks for your waggons at dawn, I
should advise you to get some sleep too."

"Thanks, I'm not sleepy--but I'll turn in when you do."

"Well, I'm going now.  The youngster has the tent.  I roll up under the
waggon."

"I'll roll up beside you," announced the stranger pleasantly.  "But I
hope you don't snore, for I am a light sleeper, and wake at the
slightest sound."  He happened to be looking steadily into the eyes of
Vivienne as he said this.

"The blazes you do!" burst out Roper violently, as though this were the
last straw.  "Well, I don't care a hang whether you sleep or not."

"Thanks," answered the other imperturbably.  Vivienne spent a wakeful
night.  As a matter of fact, snoring was not an accomplishment of
Roper's, so she was unable to gather from the silence that reigned under
the waggon whether either or neither of the men slept.  She lay
straining her ears for what seemed ages, but the only break in the
silence was the sound of the _umfan_ at his mechanical duty of
replenishing the fire, until, in the dark hour just before dawn, she was
aroused from an uneasy doze by a faint movement at the opening of the
tent.  She lay dead still, and for one moment her heart seemed to miss a
beat.  In the darkness she could see nothing by which to judge whether
the person near were friend or foe, but suddenly her heart beat again,
for a faint fragrance of Navy Cut tobacco had come stealing into the
tent, and she knew that fragrance well.  She had sat next to it for many
days in a coach.  Very different that to the rank odour of Roper's Boer
_tabak_.

Then, silently and swiftly, a small heavy object, cold and polished to
the touch slid in beside her.  Her hand slipped round it, and another
hand closed for an instant on hers, then withdrew.  No word was spoken.

As soon as it was light enough, she examined her new possession, though
her fingers had long since informed her of its character.  A beautiful
Colt's, loaded in all its five chambers.  A tiny leaf of paper tucked
into the barrel bore a few scribbled words:

"_Use this if necessary.  Don't worry about consequences.  I'll look
after those, Kerry_."

Part of the "y" of "Kerry" had been left behind in the note book from
which the leaf was torn.

"Well! our friend the gallant pioneer has gone, hey?"

It was the first time Roper had ever come near the waggon tent while she
was in it, and the coincidence was not lost upon Vivienne.  He sat on
the brake now, face level with the mattress, and looked in with a
triumphant leer on his degenerate face.  But his news was no news to
her.  She had climbed down softly as soon as it was light, according to
her usual custom, and made for herself the discovery that the stranger
was gone.  It was no more than she expected.  The gift of the revolver
had meant nothing if it had not meant that he would not be there to use
it himself in case of need.  The knowledge that it reposed under the
pillow close to her hand was of great service to her nerves at the
present moment, enabling her to answer Roper with an air of nonchalance
that surprised him.

"I daresay he will soon catch us up again."

"Oh, _do_ you?  And what makes you daresay that, hey?"

She moved her shoulders in a slight disdainful movement, to express that
he and his question bored her intolerably, but for all her assumed
carelessness she was on the alert.  It was as much for her own
reassurance as for his annoyance that she remarked:

"His waggons can't be far off, or he wouldn't have reached us on foot
last night."

"Ah!"  Roper sat gazing at her, his moustache lifted sideways, the
shadow of a sneering smile under his half-closed lids.  It was patent to
her that he was meditating something malignant, though what it was she
could not at present fathom.  No word did he speak on the subject of
their last night's interrupted conversation: but his glance, travelling
over her in slow gloating detail, was eloquent of much that his tongue
left unsaid; and though her eyes met his with scornful contempt, she
could feel the colour mounting in her cheeks and passing over her face
from chin to hair in a hot wave.  And the sight was not lost on Roper.
Laughing in his throat in a way that chilled her blood, he jumped from
the brake and walked away.

Immediately afterwards, he let loose a storm of abuse upon the _umfans_,
who began to scuttle round the camp like frightened squirrels.  It was
unusual for him to be stirring in the camp at such an early hour, and
this was their time to be cutting their own little capers while they
collected fuel and stowed it on the other waggon for the night fires.
Roper now diverted them from this to the task of clearing up camp.  Then
Vivienne heard him get down the ox-whip from the side of the waggon and
begin to swirl the lash round and round in the air.  A moment later the
revolver-like crack of the huge whip went ringing and echoing across the
veld and she understood.  It was the sign for the return of the oxen!
He meant to begin the afternoon _trek_ about five hours earlier than
usual!

Thus, when the stranger, secure in the knowledge that all transport
riders give their oxen from ten to twelve hours for rest and grazing,
caught up to the present outspan, it would be to find Roper gone with a
five hours' start.  And once let anyone get five hours' start of you on
the veld it will take stiff running to catch up.  A man with oxen in
less robust condition than Roper's might never catch up!  This was the
situation Vivienne had to face, and, thanks to the Colt, she was able to
face it without panic.  But her heart was somewhere in the vicinity of
her boots as she watched the weary oxen come trampling back from their
short respite.  Seeming to know that they had been robbed of their
legitimate rest, they kicked and butted each other, ran round the
waggons, and gave as much trouble as they could.  Many a bad and bitter
word went to their yoking, but at last they were under weigh, raising
clouds of dust as they took the road.

It was soon clear that Roper did not mean to let things go at the usual
easy pace.  He kept the lash over his beasts, running beside them like a
man possessed, cracking and swirling the long whip thong in the air,
letting out astonishing cries, and long streams of words which though
incomprehensible to the uninitiated ear left, by the violent sound of
them, no doubt as to their character, every injunction ending in a
ferocious command to "_Yak_!"

The oxen at an incredible pace shuffled and clappered along, the waggon
spite of its heavy load bounding and swaying at their heels.  Sometimes
Roper, a menacing figure covered with dust, appeared round the end of
the waggon and dropped back a few paces on the road, thereby enabling
himself to see well into the tent where Vivienne sat guarding her
shaking soul behind a calm and unapprehensive manner.  Nearly always he
would laugh--a laugh that made the girl grip the revolver under the
pillow.  A moment later she would hear his voice adjuring the oxen with
a savage "_Yak_!"

It must have been about four o'clock in the afternoon when she found
herself suddenly face to face with him in the opening of the tent.  With
such unexpected agility had he sprung upon the brake that for the moment
she was taken unawares, and might easily have been out-generalled, but
for his cocksureness that he was master of the situation.  He stood
there smiling his slow evil smile--giving her time to shift farther into
the tent and lay her hand on the stock of the revolver.  "What do you
want?" she demanded evenly.  He assumed an air of hurt surprise.  "I
suppose I can have a ride in my own waggon if I want to?"

"Not here," she said in a firm voice.  "You must go and ride where you
have always ridden.  This tent has been given over to me and I mean to
keep possession of it."

"Oh, you wouldn't be so unkind," he said with a slimy smile, and made to
mount his knee on the mattress and clamber in, but found himself nose to
nose with the shining steel barrel.

"If you stir a hand, I fire."  Her voice was absolutely steady.  "Get
down!"

His utterly dumbfoundered look and the alacrity with which he loosened
his hold on the side of the tent and dropped from the brake was funny.
But his face was not funny.  Something in it made Vivienne shiver.  His
mouth under the tilted moustache worked as if it tasted poison, and his
eyes were bad to see.  Down in the road he looked upwards once more to
where Vivienne sat, the weapon lowered, but still in sight.

"So that's it?" he muttered.  "He left you his revolver, did he?"

It was plain, of course, that she could have come by it in no other way.
He walked behind awhile blinking and swallowing the dust, considering
perhaps the problem of how much she had told the other man.  Then
silently in his veld-schoened feet he passed to the side of the waggon,
and for the time being she saw him no more.

Nor even heard him.  The tent on a buck-waggon is so placed that when
the latter is loaded there is no way of entering or seeing from the tent
except from the brake end.  The whole of the back opening was blocked
with heavy packing-cases that could not have been budged except by the
efforts of several men.  Vivienne congratulated herself on that for it
made for safety.  But it also kept her in ignorance of what was going
forward in the front part of the waggon, or even at the sides.  All she
could do through that long bright hot afternoon was to sit like Sister
Anne in her tower watching the road down which help might come.

When she observed that the waggon was no longer on the road, she was
instantly on the alert for the meaning of the new move.  It was too
early to outspan, and if Roper did so he must know that he could easily
be caught up, for they had not been travelling more than three hours!
But they did not stop.  They went crashing on over shrub and bush,
lurching against ant-hills, being torn at by the branches of trees.

At last, the terrified girl realised what was happening.  Roper was
leaving the road and all danger of interference from those who might be
travelling on it, and making for the wild bush!

What should she do?  Jump down and run?  He might, expecting that, be
lurking beside the waggon, and spring upon her while her hands in
descending were yet engaged in holding the quickly moving waggon.  There
was a subtle cunning about the fellow that terrified her.  Better stay
in the tent where at least she had her face to the foe, and her back
guarded by packing-cases.  Besides, to where could she run?  Back to the
bush, to be lost once more, perhaps for ever this time?  No, better stay
and fight it out; die fighting, if necessary.  That was what the man had
given the gun for.  And he meant to come back.  She felt sure of that.
She trusted him.  But would he come in time?

On and on went the waggon, lurching and swaying over the rough ground.
Once a dead branch ripped open the roof of the tent and a long slit of
blue sky showed through.  Another time a back wheel sank deep into a
hole, and the whole waggon tipped over to such an angle that Vivienne
found herself standing on the canvas ribs of the tent with her back
keeping up the mattress and bedding.  It took much hooting and hauling,
two boys working with a crowbar, and Roper lashing, and howling terrible
imprecations at the oxen before they pulled out and went lumbering on.
The sun began to sink, and the skies to turn blood red with the trees
inked against them.  The approaching night looked menacing and full of
danger.  The girl crouched in the tent holding fast to the revolver.

"Oh, this Africa!  What terrible things she has done to me, and is
doing!  What terrible things has she still in her hand?  `_Out of Africa
always something new_,' indeed!  Pliny knew something when he wrote
that!  Oh, man Kerry, do not fail me!  Come soon!"

She kept saying that last sentence over and over again, like a prayer.
Sometimes it seemed to her the only prayer she knew.  The night fell
abruptly, as pitch-black as if some monstrous bat had spread its wings
and blotted out the light.  There was no moon, and storm clouds had
defaced the stars.  Since first she came to the veld, Vivienne had never
seen a night so black, so filled with brooding abysmal loneliness.

At last, the waggon stopped.  Yokes began to clatter and fall, and the
tired beasts lowed moodily as they moved away.  The flicker of a swiftly
lighted fire sprang up, casting knife-like shafts of light through the
heavy darkness, and the weary, nerve-wrung girl in the tent, tense as an
overstrung violin, braced herself for she knew not what fresh ordeal of
terror might be awaiting her in this silent lonely spot.  She was well
aware that it was of no use relying on any help from the cowed native
boys.  There was nothing to hope from anyone, or anything, but her own
courage and the revolver.  She had a sudden, swift vision of the
light-eyed man who had left it with her, and a little involuntary cry
burst from her heart at the thought of him.

"Oh, Kerry!--come!"

She would never have known that she had cried the words aloud but for
the immediate answer that came in a casual, confident voice she seemed
to have known all her life.

"All serene--don't worry."

Something loomed large and white below the brake, but the voice seemed
to be on a level with her, and almost she fancied she could catch the
gleam of his eyes in the enveloping darkness.  She was too shaken with
joy and relief to make any response, neither was there time, for Roper
raging and profane arrived upon the scene.

"What the--?  Who the--" came his infuriated voice.

"I've had a hard time catching you up," drawled the stranger.  "Why, my
good fellow, what kind of transport rider are you?  You've lost the
road!  I wonder what Deary and Co. would say if they knew their goods
were being battered and bundled all over the veld like this, miles off
the track?"

The rage of the baffled Roper came down like a river in flood, a foul
torrent of abuse in Dutch and Kaffir mingled with English.  Fortunately,
most of it was incomprehensible to Vivienne, but she was able to gather
that the man on the horse, Deary and Co., the goods, and the veld, were
all being consigned _en bloc_ to a place whose exact geographical
position has never yet been officially defined.

The fire now burning brightly revealed the new-comer seated idly on a
large white tailless horse, which in outline somewhat resembled a grey
hound and whose lean sides were closely pitted with tiny blue spots as
though it had at some past time suffered from smallpox.  The rider in
his shirt sleeves looked cool and careless as always, but the hair lying
dank upon his forehead and the soapy foam upon his horse's flank told a
tale which whoever ran might read.  He now, with the subsidence of
Roper's eloquence, contributed his favourite remark to the occasion.

"_That's_ all right."

"What the Billy-cock-hat," (or words to that effect) "do you want, hey?"
demanded Roper.

"Just company.  The pleasant time I spent with you last night gave me a
taste for more.  Then too I was sure you'd be glad of my assistance in
finding your way back to the road to-morrow, without being obliged to
lose several days in doubling on your tracks.  Deary and Co. are
particular friends of mine, and I know they'll be grateful for anything
I can do in the way of speeding up their goods."

Some part of this information, or the nonchalance with which it was
delivered gave Roper pause, and made him swallow any further
observations he might have felt inclined to offer.  He turned away
muttering in savage tones something about his boys having "left the
road" while he slept.  The lie was an obvious one, but the stranger
doubtless had his own reason for accepting it blandly and without
comment.  He now dismounted, unsaddled and knee-haltered his horse, and
turned it to graze.  Without taking further notice of Roper or anyone
else, he proceeded to gather fuel from the neighbouring bush, and in a
short time had a great fire of his own leaping in the gloom.  He had
built it some twenty yards or more from the waggons, but exactly facing
Vivienne's watch tower, and by its rays she could see him foraging in
his saddle-bags and preparing a meal.  He made no attempt to communicate
with her or amalgamate in any way with Roper's camp.  She wondered a
little at this, but had already learned to rely upon the certainty of
his knowing what he was about, and having a good reason for his every
action.  Since the moment she heard the unexpected sound of his voice, a
feeling of peace and security had invaded her.  Her strung nerves were
at rest, and menace had gone from the night with the knowledge that this
man was of those who took the fate of others in his hands and that hers
was for the moment in his keeping.

A drowsy weariness had followed upon the strain of the afternoon, and
her inclination was to sleep, but the sight of her knight-errant taking
his supper in a very natural and everyday manner made her wonder whether
she ought not to do the same, not only for the sake of keeping up
appearances, but to preserve her health in case of emergencies.  So when
an _umfan_ came as usual to tell her that the dinner was ready, she
descended from the waggon, and strolling over to the packing-case took
her place as though nothing in the world had happened.

But sitting opposite a face which wore baffled rage and spite printed on
every line of it was not a pleasant experience, and she was glad to look
past it sometimes to a figure lying full length, smoking peacefully by a
fire.  The man Kerry never once glanced their way, but Vivienne was
curiously aware of his being on the alert for every sound and movement
in the camp.  She knew very well that he could hear her say to Roper
that it would be a pleasant act of courtesy to send over a cup of coffee
to the stranger who evidently had no kettle in which to make any, and
Roper's surly response to the suggestion.

"Look here!  Do you take me for a damn-fool Samaritan?"

"No, indeed!" she retorted dryly.  "But I thought that even you might be
inclined to perform an act of common decency."

"Well, you thought wrong.  I told you before that my waggon wasn't a
hotel for lost, stolen, or strays, didn't I?"

Her only answer was to emphatically refuse the cup of coffee proffered
her by an _umfan_.  The rest of the meal was accomplished in silence.

Back in her tent once more, she composed herself for the night, revolver
to hand, her face towards her friend.  He had made another collection of
fuel, and evidently meant to keep a big fire going all night.  Something
in the quiet way he had settled himself, half seated against his saddle,
told her that he meant to keep watch.

Also, he had produced a book, and was leaning forward in the firelight
ruffling its pages, and softly whistling to himself.  A wave of pleasure
tingled through the girl as she recognised the air for one she had known
and loved all her life; that exquisite setting by Mendelssohn and Lizst
to Heine's poem _On Wings of Song_.  She was strangely thrilled to hear
its dear familiar cadence in this wild spot.  Like the twinkle of
home-lights seen suddenly from afar by a lost wayfarer, it gladdened and
put fresh courage into her heart.  How strange it seemed that this
shirt-sleeved man who seemed part and parcel of primitive Africa, whom
she had looked upon as a sort of Boer, should know anything so
exquisitely civilised as the "_Auf Flugeln des Gesanges_!"  She lay
listening dreamily, her mind putting Heine's words to the frail haunting
air.

  On wings of song, Belov'd One,
      Away I'll waft thee, to where
  I know in the plains of the Ganges
      A secret nook most fair.

  There sleeps a rich blossoming garden,
      Calm in the still moonlight:
  The lotus flowers are awaiting
      Their dearest Sister to-night.

  The violets laugh as they prattle,
      And gaze on the stars in their spheres;
  Odorous legends the roses breathe
      Low in each other's ears.

  There bound, and stand shyly listening,
      The gentle timid gazelles;
  Afar, from the sacred river,
      The waves' deep murmur swells.

  There under the palms reclining,
      We'll drink by the sacred stream
  Of love and rest in full measure,
      And blissful dreams will we dream.

_On Wings of Sleep_ it should have been called, she thought, for the
whole thing was a dream that could only come in sleep.  It occurred to
her at last that the man Kerry thought so too, and meant his persistent
though soft whistling as a hint to her to sleep while he kept watch.  It
seemed indeed the best thing she could do, so that later when he was
tired out she in turn could keep guard.  Already Roper had got down his
blankets, and she knew by the lowered tones of the _umfans_ that he had
retired under the waggon.

Wearied out by the various emotions of the day, it did not take her long
to fall asleep, but several times during the night she awoke, prompted
by a restless fear which even through her dreams vaguely disturbed her.
But always there was calm in the camp, and always the man Kerry sat
intent on his little book.  The storm clouds had gone by, and the sky,
shroudy and mysterious as the blue veil of an Eastern woman, was hung
with jewels that shed a misty luminance over the immense and silent
land.

When she finally threw off sleep in the small hours before dawn it was
to find Kerry still lying there on his elbow placidly smoking.  His book
was still in his hand, but he appeared to be reading the fire rather
than it.  Vivienne wondered how she could let him know that she was
awake and able to take up the vigil, but with the _Wings of Song_ still
haunting her memory she did not wonder long.  Very softly she began to
whistle the air.  He stirred, and glanced towards the tent.  She
whistled delicately on, and saw a slow smile flicker for a moment across
his impassive face.  Then he closed his book and lowered his head to the
saddle.  He understood.  She stopped whistling.  He slept, and she
vigilled until the stars turned white and the hand of Dawn pushed them
back from sight, and in their place scattered red and golden roses
across the skies.

Full morning brought new factors into the game.  Two sinewy Bechuana
boys came light-foot up the trail of broken trees and crushed ant-hills
made by Roper's waggons, and approaching Kerry set down the heavy
packages from their heads and gravely saluted him.  An _indaba_ ensued,
accompanied by an arm-wave or two at the track by which they had come,
some soft clicking remarks, and a few low sighs.  Kerry, his pipe in his
teeth, listened reflectively, and at the end of the recital gave a brief
order to each.  One went away to the horse, the other proceeded to make
a cooking fire and unpack one of the loads which obviously contained
provisions.

Vivienne, who had been for a little morning walk, and now sat on a rock
some distance away, saw Roper, much intrigued, watching the proceedings
from under his waggon.  When he could no longer contain his curiosity he
slouched over to Kerry.

"What's all this?  Whose boys are these?"

"Mine.  Any objection to them?"

"Well!--What the Halifax?--How do you travel then?  Where is your
waggon?"

"I can't remember ever having mentioned a waggon," was the imperturbable
answer.

That was the secret of it all then!  He had no waggon.  Only a horse and
two native carriers.  Vivienne to whom the whole conversation came clear
on the morning air witnessed also Roper's stupified amazement.

"So you're just hanging on to me?" he snarled at last.

"I like pleasant company."

"To Jerusalem with you--well, _I_ don't!"

"It's a free country."  Kerry's manner was unfailingly suave, but at
this juncture he arose from the mound on which he was seated and made it
clear that as far as he was concerned the conversation was closed.
There was nothing left for Roper but to return to his own business of
making things as unpleasant as possible for everyone in his camp.  All
through that torrid day he prowled and swore around his waggons,
furiously tinkering and greasing and patching up the injuries they had
sustained during the forced _trek_, giving his boys no rest from labour
and abuse.  But never once did he come near Vivienne, nor throw her a
glance.  She sat in her tent most of the day, mending a hole in the knee
of her knickerbockers or staring at the sunlit land about her.

Thus it was from day to day.  The two parties _trekked_ and outspanned
together as though they were one, yet after the first day never a word
passed between them.  Kerry made no attempt to communicate with
Vivienne.  Roper never spoke to Kerry.  Vivienne passed her days
unmolested by Roper.

The objectionable feature of the affair was Roper's offensive habit of
airing in a loud voice at the night outspan his opinion of "loafers" and
"hangers-on"--men who "followed like jackals the waggon of another man,
having none of their own."  Kerry might have been a stock or a stone for
all the sign he gave of hearing any of these things.  But Vivienne's
cheek burned for him, and at times she felt a curious impatience that
one who had taken upon himself the chivalrous affair of guarding her
should be able to put up with such insults.  She could not help thinking
that since he was there for her protection a simple way out of an odious
situation would be for him to say: "Look here; come over to my camp, and
I'll take care of you, and let this fellow go to the deuce.  Certainly
you will have to rough it with me, but you have to rough it in any case
with this lout."  She would have gone like a bird from a cage.  In fact,
she could not understand how any chivalrous man could fail to see that
it was the only dignified thing to do, especially when Roper began
presently to be ironical to her on the subject of her condescension in
staying in his camp.  One evening he remarked to her rudely: "I wonder
you don't go and take up your quarters with your pal the Pioneer,
instead of housing in my tent."

She was furious that the Pioneer, smoking not twenty yards off, took no
more notice than if he were deaf or a fish.  It seemed to her that
patience might go a little too far, and a chill disdain began to take
root in her soul.

And then one day she realised that it was rather a good thing after all
that he had not invited her to leave Roper's waggon to join his own
unsheltered caravan.  That was the day on which the heavy lowering heat
broke at last in a storm such as she had never known in her life.  When
trees and iron rocks leaped in flame and fell under splitting flashes of
lightning, thunder seemed to explode upwards from the bowels of the
earth to meet an answering detonation in the heavens, and rain came down
like grey straight rods of steel, battering the road into a liquid,
quivering mass of mud.

At the first warning peal, Roper had drawn his waggons to a standstill,
covered everything with great bucksails and retired under the shelter of
one, while the boys took shelter under the other.  Peering from
ant-eaten holes in her bucksail, Vivienne could just distinguish through
the heavy curtain of rain her rear-guard escort--the white horse with
drooping head and drapery of mackintosh, and a tall figure sheltering to
leewards of it.  The carriers with the instinctive art of natives had
found some cranny of shelter somewhere, but Kerry and his horse got the
full brunt of the storm.

In less than an hour, it was all over.  A turquoise sky burned overhead,
vivid orange sunshine drew clouds of incense from tree and earth and
rock.  The quivering mud of the roadway was the only unsightly evidence
of what had passed--that and the drenched forms of a man and beast whom
Roper mocked obliquely by calling up to Vivienne:

"Nice weather for jackals, hey?  I've just been waiting for this!  We'll
have it every day now the wet season has set in."

The girl's heart sank.  But it was to sink lower yet in the days that
followed when Roper's words came true and the storm faithfully repeated
itself.  She began to wonder then whether she had not misjudged the
Pioneer, and to realise that possibly his knowledge of the country and
the climate had something to do with the regulation of his temper to
Roper's sneers.  It was clear at any rate that if she had left the
waggon and sought refuge with him she, too, would have had to weather
the blinding storms that came and went every day regularly as clockwork,
always leaving the country fresh and fragrant as a rose.  Except for the
roads!  The going grew heavier daily and in that at least triumph was
not all on Roper's side, for while he was obliged to keep to the
morass-like track or risk capsize, Kerry's horse could pick its way
delicately between rocks and ant-holes at the roadside.  After the first
day or two of wet weather the native bearers disappeared, and Kerry's
horse bore the weight of an extra bundle.

It was a despairing experience to watch man and horse half-drown every
day, then dry in clouds of steam under the brilliant sunshine that
followed, and Vivienne sickened of it.  She knew, too, that however
strong the man, such an experience could not go on indefinitely without
affecting his health, and she trembled for the day when he would perhaps
fall ill of fever or pneumonia.  Fortunately that day never dawned.  One
morning just as the sun was bursting forth after a terrible downpour,
and the bucksails were being removed from the waggons, the blare of a
coach horn came sailing through the air and a sound of mules' hoofs
flapping in the mud.  Vivienne almost jumped out of her skin with joy at
the sight of a mail-coach, empty of everything but the driver and a mass
of mail-bags.

Within twenty minutes, she was stowed inside the cart tent, the white
horse was switched on behind, and the drawn-up coach waited only on the
convenience of Kerry who before he could take his place in the cart
wished to change his soaking clothes for some he had dried overnight.
The bush being his only retiring-room he prepared to take his bundle
thither, but first he stepped over and addressed a curt remark to Roper
scowling beside his waggon.

"Come along with me!"

"Come with you?  I'll see you up a gum tree first."

"Very well.  You can take what's coming to you here instead if you
prefer it."

"What do you mean?"  Roper's face was belligerent but he began to back.
The other's eyes, suddenly grown very steel-coloured, had taken a kind
of measuring glance into them.

"Just this, that you don't surely suppose you're going to be let off for
your infernal cheek of the past ten days?--and all the annoyance you
have caused this gentleman here?"  (He slightly indicated Vivienne.)

"_Gentleman_!" sniggered Roper, but got no further, for his mouth was
stopped in a very rude and unkind manner.  Vivienne's heart gave a leap
at the sound of the blow.  Never before had she seen a man thrashed, nor
any kind of brute violence used by one man to another.  A month or two
back, the very idea of such a thing would have made her sick, probably
have caused her to faint.  It is certain that she would, out of very
hatred of violence, have sided with the aggressed, whatever his crime,
against the aggressor.  It showed how Africa had steeled her nerves and
readjusted her sense of values that she could sit through the scientific
and very thorough punching to which the transport driver was treated,
without turning a hair.

Afterwards, Roper's boys, with a jubilation of manner never before
observed in them, removed their master to the shade of his waggon and
administered whiskey, while the man Kerry went away to wash his hands
and make a quick change.  The post-cart driver, a swarthy half-Dutch
colonial, who talked the most extraordinary language Vivienne had ever
heard, beguiled the tedium of waiting with anecdotes of Roper's past.

"_Maar_! it was _lekker_ to see dat _slegte skepsel_ get it good and
red!  _Ach! sis ja_, he's de worst stinkhond on dis road.  I knowed him
well _daar bij de Kaap.  Ja wat_! he done ten years mealie-meal pap on
de Cape Town breakwater already for I.D.B., and another five years in de
Bloemfontein _tronk_ for half murdering an _arme kind_ of a Hottentot
girl.  He hit her on de head with a _klip, wat!  Allemagtie! sis_, yes,
he's a _vaabond_.  I seen him do some dirty jobs between here and
Mafeking.  _Verneuking_ de Kaffirs and hammering his boys for _niks nie.
Ek seh ver jou_, dere isn't nothing what dat _verdomde bliksem_
wouldn't do!"

Vivienne could well believe it.  Such of the narrative as was
comprehensible to her made her more deeply realise what her danger had
been and how much she owed to the protection of Kerry.  Her heart glowed
with a warmth and gratitude she had never expected to feel again for
anyone as she saw him returning, fresh from his dip and change,
nonchalant as ever.

"Oh, how good you've been to me!  What should I have done if you had not
come!" she cried, and put out her hands to his in a gesture as charming
as it was spontaneous.

"That's all right," he said easily.  But impassivity went out of his
face and darkness came into his eyes for a moment as he touched her
hands.  Then they sat side by side behind the driver while the mules
spattered onwards through the mud.  She recounted to him all she could
remember of her adventure from the time she knew herself lost until
Roper's appearance roused her from the mental lethargy into which panic
and privation had plunged her.  But of the ten days' gap in between she
could tell him no more than if she had returned from the dead.

"Only it seems like a miracle that you should have come upon the scene
just when you did!"

"It was lucky I left the coach at Palapye," he said reflectively.  But
he did not mention why he had done so.  "When I got back some days
later, there was no way of proceeding except by taking a horse and a
couple of bearers."

"Did you hear then that I was lost?"

"Yes," he said briefly.  "The Government had people out searching for
you, but you must have travelled at a great rate.  I expect you'll want
to wire to let people know you are all right as soon as we get near a
telegraph office?"

"I suppose so," she said slowly.  "Unless it would be possible to just
arrive and say nothing as to where I have been, and about that awful
time with Roper.  I should like that above all."  She looked at him
appealingly and then at her grimy clothes.  "It would be terrible to run
the gauntlet like this!"

"We must think up something," he said.

"It is only a matter of clothes to arrive in," she said presently.  "I
expect I shall find my baggage all safely there."

"Of course.  Well, the best plan will be for me to drop you at Fisher's
half-way house, a day's drive from Buluwayo.  I'll proceed by coach and
send you back whatever you need, and some kind of conveyance to come on
by.  The woman at Fisher's is a quiet, half-dazed Dutch creature who
won't talk if she sees you enter a young man and go forth a young
woman."

She coloured slightly, conscious suddenly of her grimy knickerbockers
and rush hat.  Then their eyes met and they both fell into a rush of
laughter that broke the last strand of stiffness between them and turned
them into girl and boy in a world empty of old griefs and pains and full
of sunlight.

They discussed without constraint what she needed in the way of clothes,
and how to outwit the curiosity of Rhodesia as to her adventure.  She
told him about her work, and something of her reason why she could not
afford to have the truth known.  And if his eyes expressed humorous
wonder that she should so much mind what the world thought when she was
clear of fault, his enthusiasm in plotting ways and means for keeping
her doings dark was no less than her own.

"You must just turn up casually at a hotel one day in your cart, and say
you've been all right--that you certainly got lost, but found good
friends and have been seeing the country and getting `copy' ever since.
Chesterfield says: `Never lie, but don't tell everything.'  Let them
think what they like.  They can't prove anything.  Roper knows that if
he speaks I'll break him to pieces.  As for this driver Koos, I can
easily square him.  He's an old crony of mine."

The sun pressed down on them hard all day, but there were fresh hills on
the horizon, and a gold and emerald scape.  The crystal air was vibrant
with the odours of rolling leagues of vivid flowers growing close to
Earth's hot brown body.  Wild bees hovered over the brilliant cactus
blooms and strange-coloured brittle cups of the sugar-bush, then rose,
honey-laden, and softly _burr-red_ their way home.

At broad noon, they outspanned by a mule stable on the banks of the
Lundi, and made a fire for which Vivienne helped collect sticks.  Koos
filled the kettle at the river, and Kerry went off on the trail of a
little bird that was hopping from tree to tree with an insistent note.
It was a honey-bird and its message was clear when Kerry came back
carrying two large honey-combs dripping with that golden wine of the
veld brewed by the little dark wild bees.

Vivienne thought she had never in her life tasted anything so delicious.
Koos was still at the river.  She and Kerry sat on two stones, close to
each other, and munched the dripping combs, looking at the great
fantastic land about them and sometimes into each other's eyes.  She did
not know that her youthful beauty had burst through grime and sunburn
like a flower from its sheath.  He did not know that distance was gone
from his eyes again and that they burned dark in his tanned face.  But
both were aware of the enfolding wings of some great unknown force.

Who drinks Nile water must return to Egypt.  Who wears _veld-schoens_
will return to the veld; who tastes of Africa's perfumed honey can never
again content him with the honey of pallid Europe.  Vivienne could not
know that by her act she was being initiated into the fellowship of that
great band whose hearts will never more be free from the thrilling
exquisite pain of Africa's claw.  She only knew that some strange taste
of strange life went from the honey into her very being and that she had
never lived before as she lived in that moment.  Life had been waiting
for her behind a veil, and now she drew nearer the veil and from behind
it came the perfume of stephanotis and cactus bloom and wild honey, the
murmuring of rivers, the music of trees.  Africa was wild honey, and
wild honey was Africa.  It had got into her blood.  Gone to her brain.
Oh, the sweetness of it!  The flame of skies and flowers!  Time and
space here for dreams!  Here the rats and mice of life--malice,
intrigue, slander, all the gibbering gnawing things that can make life
hell--were absent.  Here one pressed one's lips to life and felt the
thrill of the kiss swinging up and down every vein in one's body.

Suddenly she gave a cry.  A bee's sting had embedded itself in the
sensitive flesh of her lower lip, and an exquisite needle-like pain
brought tears to her eyes.  He saw at once what had happened and sprang
up.

"I'll get it out.  Hold still a minute."

Touching her face with strong fingers grown extraordinarily delicate, he
pinched the lip until he was able to extract the tiny dark sting.  She
closed her eyes and a tear slipping down her cheek wetted his fingers.

Then he kissed her with the honey and salt wet on her lips, as one might
kiss a little crying child.  And almost as simply and naturally she
kissed him back.  When she realised what she had done, her heart seemed
to become hollow in the sunlight for one moment, then full, brimming
over with some strange wine.  She wanted to be furious with him, but
looking at his eyes no words would come to her lips.  They stood there
staring at each other like people in a dream.  The sight of Koos coming
back recalled her to herself, the spell under which she had been, broke.
Frigid conventional words came to her lips, of the kind she might have
spoken in a London drawing-room.

"You forget yourself! ...  How dared you!"

His clear tanned face assumed a deep flush and he turned away abruptly.
If she expected an apology she was disappointed.  No other word was
spoken between them, and when they mounted the coach it was by the
driver's side he sat, leaving the whole of the back seat to her.

She found in this something to be thankful for, though her soul resented
it.  Slowly, with the gold of afternoon and red lights of evening, her
anger faded away, but the enchantment of Africa faded too, and she felt
cold, cold to the bone.

At the next stopping-place, a young Dutchman was waiting for the coach,
and went on with them the following morning.  He turned out to be a
sprightly fellow from the Eastern Province, anxious to air his views on
the subject of Cape politics and ostrich farming.  Vivienne earned a
reputation for unsociability by retiring under the shadow of a large
felt hat she had obtained at the hotel store.  But Kerry, who to make
way for the stranger had been obliged to return to the back seat,
covered her strange manner and appearance by sitting forward and
entering into long arguments.  Sometimes both men would lapse into the
Boer _taal_, and for frequent spells not a word they said was
intelligible to the girl.  At such times, Kerry seemed more than a
stranger to her.  She burned to remember what had passed between them,
and shrank away as far as possible into her corner.  He appeared to
notice nothing.  His own manner became curiously heavy, dull as the day
went on; a day of torrid heat, air full of thunder and thick with dust.
Everyone fell into silence at last, and no sound but the driver's bitter
curses and the flack of his whip broke the brooding weariness.

In the late afternoon, a mule fell dead-lame, delaying arrival at
Fisher's until past midnight.  As she limped from the coach sick with
fatigue, Vivienne caught a glimpse by lantern-light of Kerry's face.  It
was strangely distorted, with eyes bright and bloodshot.  The sight of
it revolted her, even as his voice speaking the coarse gutteral _taal_
had done.  But she was too tired to care about anything.  Her whole mind
had concentrated itself on the thought of bed, and a longing to extend
her weary bones in sleep.  So that when on the _stoep_, as they waited
to be led to their huts, Kerry came near her muttering something
indistinguishable, she turned away from him dully, with eyes and ears
only for the woman who was to show the way.

It was not until late the next morning that her mind cleared enough to
think.  Then her first wonder was why she had not been called to rejoin
the coach.  After lying still a long time, she remembered the plan that
she was to be left at this place, and made haste to dress to find out
whether the coach had gone without her.  Before her clothes were on, a
knock came at the door, and she opened it a crack to the stupid,
sad-looking woman of the night before.  The following dialogue ensued:

"If you want korfie and grub I'll bring it to you.  The big _baas_ said
you was to have what you wanted."

"Have they gone?"

"Ya.  The coach went at six.  The big _baas_ said you was too sick to go
and must rest in bed till he sends for you."

"Very well; bring me something to eat, please."  She got back into bed,
and little of her face was showing when the woman returned with food,
set it down dully, and departed.

Time and space in which to think, lying there behind the bolted door,
battered mud walls about her, bulging thatch overhead full of fat black
spiders that sat immovable as Fate in their lairs.  And her thoughts
were of the long, long kind, though there was little of youth in them.
She was so silent that the flies pretended to believe her dead and
descended upon her in black battalions.  The struggle to keep them off
made the whole business just a little more sordid, and roused in her a
kind of sullen fury against Africa and all that in it was.

"I must get out of it," she muttered to herself.  "It is driving me mad.
I must have been mad to let that man kiss me--a common oaf who talks
Dutch in that horrible throaty way--a sort of Boer--how dared he!"

She tried to remember his face as it had revolted her the night before,
suffused with blood and swollen, but she could only remember the keen,
quiet eyes full of light and distance, and how they had darkened when he
looked at her, and how they had measured up Roper, and how her heart had
leaped in her breast at the sound of the first blow.

"I am mad," she reiterated wearily, and covered her eyes.  "This
miserable country has driven me mad!"

At sundown the next day, the woman brought a parcel and the news that a
cart had come and would be ready to start again at dawn.  The parcel
contained a man's mackintosh, a dark blue coat and skirt of simple not
to say skimpy design, a white blouse, and sailor hat.  She shook out the
Philistine garments carefully as if she thought a scorpion--or a note--
might be hidden among them.  But no sign of either.

"_Tant mieux_!" she said at last, and discarded the rush hat and
tattered shirt almost violently as if with them she hoped to throw off
the last trace of her veld madness.

Wrapped in the mackintosh she slipped out to the waiting cart in the
dimness of the dawn, and started on the last lap of the journey that was
originally to have taken her ten days, but had already extended to six
weeks!  Only when the lights of Buluwayo gleamed before her at last
could she really believe the end had come.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Within a week, civilisation had its grip on her once more, and she was
her cynical self with the nut of bitter dust back in her breast.

The opening up of the country had brought a fashionable English crowd to
Buluwayo, among them many people that she knew and had special feuds
with.  One of the latter was Lady Angela Vinning, a woman with a good
figure, beautiful, pleading green eyes, and thumbs down on every other
woman except those who for the moment happened to fit into her schemes.
She and Vivienne were staying at the same hotel, and exchanged polite
greetings and glances of disdain every morning.  Vivienne despised her
for what she was: false, unscrupulous, and mean-souled.  She detested
Vivienne for being fifteen years younger than herself, and that is the
most poignant of all the feminine hatreds.

Other grounds for general detestation by her own sex soon made patent to
Vivienne were: (1) that Wolfe Montague, the richest man in South Africa,
took no pains to hide the fact that his main business in Buluwayo was to
be perpetually at her heels; (2) that having been romantically lost on
the veld and found again no one quite knew how, she was the
most-talked-of person in the country; and (3) that she had turned up
looking perfectly radiant, and been seen of none until after regaining
possession of her extremely _chic_ clothes.  Tales with a tang to them
were soon flying round Buluwayo.  Vivienne assumed her mask and with a
calm mien went about her business of "writing up" the country.  But
behind the mask and the mien she was raging.  It was London and the
torment of the last few years over again, only at closer quarters, for
here she must share the same hotel with her enemies, run into them
daily, and smile and exchange sweet words with them.

"If I could only wipe my boots on them all instead!" she thought
savagely, and at such moments almost decided to marry Montague, whose
flame grew more and more ardent with the days.  But always a shadow
slipped between her and her decision--a shadow with grey eyes!  Where
had those eyes disappeared to?  She never saw them, and no one mentioned
the name Kerry.  The thing puzzled her, yet she was grimly glad.  Of
what use getting that strange torment of honey and perfume and wild
places into her veins again, when she cared only for the call of
civilisation, longed only for power and the weapons of wealth with which
to smite these little-minded women who thought themselves so clever and
fine?  She would never be happy until she had power to make others
suffer as she had been made to suffer.  What had such an ambition to do
with the honeyed madness she had known on the banks of the Lundi?
Nothing.

One day, writing by the open window of her bedroom, she heard two men
talking in the hotel verandah.  One was a solicitor whom she had met,
called Cornwall, and a remark of his riveted her attention.

"Brain and Hunt are after it.  They'll give five hundred, but de Windt
doesn't seem inclined to sell, though he needs money to get up North."

"I'll go a hundred better," said the other man firmly.  "It's a good
farm and I'd like it myself.  Try him with that."

"Right.  I'll try him."

Vivienne sat transfixed.  The whole story rushed back to her mind and
with it the remembrance of her plan to outdo the rogues by buying the
farm herself.  She had scorned the idea then, and despised herself for
harbouring it, but in her present frame of mind it stood up salient and
welcome as an old friend.  Swiftly she found herself once more
considering the question of where to raise the money.

She heard the other man bid Cornwall good-bye with a last injunction to
see de Windt at once and make the offer, and a moment or two later she
sauntered into the verandah and spoke to the solicitor.

"I heard that man's offer for de Windt's farm, and I want to tell you
I'd like to buy it myself.  I'll give 800 pounds."

Cornwall stared at her, smiling.

"You bitten with the land mania too, Miss Carlton?"

"Yes."

"There's plenty of it about," he remarked tentatively.  "And de Windt's
not particularly keen on selling."

"It must be _his_ farm or none," she said firmly.  "I have a particular
fancy for the place."

"Oh, well!  I'll see what I can do for you.  It's a good offer, more
than the farm is worth, I think.  De Windt's lying ill at present with a
bad go of malaria.  But I'll put the matter to him and let you know the
result."

"Thank you."

She went inside again, and sat on her bed pretending to wonder where the
money was to come from.  In reality she knew perfectly well, and she
didn't care.  She was in the dirty business now, up to her eyebrows, for
loss or gain.  If she gained she would give back Montague his 800 pounds
and a wave of the hand.  If she lost she must marry him and forever hide
the fact that he had been no more than a cat's-paw and a _pis aller_.

"He is too good for me anyway," she reflected.  "Any man is too good for
me.  I've become a scoundrel and an adventuress.  Three months of South
Africa have done wonders for me!  And I don't care--I don't care!"

She bathed her hot face but could not take the burn from it.  It was
still brightly flushed, making her look very young and lovely, when she
stood before Montague and proffered her abrupt request.

"Will you lend me a thousand pounds for three months?"

Reflection had shown her that she might have to bid higher, or that even
if she got it for 800 pounds she would need a margin sum with which to
prosecute the search for gold.  Further, if she could borrow the money
for three months, she might be able to sell and refund to him.

"Of course," said Montague promptly, and could not keep elation out of
his eyes.  He looked like a large fair bull, was very red and very
good-natured, but a hard man at a bargain.

"And will you do something for me?" he asked smiling.

"I cannot attach any conditions," she said quickly.  "Mine is entirely a
business proposition."

"And mine is, as far at least as I am concerned, pure pleasure.  It is
only to ask you to wear this little jewel for me."  He held out a small
morocco leather case, but she did not put out a hand to receive it.  He
sighed.

"Say then to wear it for three months.  If when we clear up this
terribly serious business proposition you wish to return it to me with
the thousand, so be it.  If you consent to keep it, I can only say--you
will make me the happiest man in the world."

Mechanically her hand received the small case, and for a moment his hand
closed on hers, and carried it to his lips.  She grew a little pale.

"I cannot promise anything," she stammered, drawing her hand away.

"I do not ask you to... yet," was his answer, but the ring remained with
her, and she knew it was part of the bargain.  When she opened the case
she was furious with herself, for it was a ring that could not escape
note--a great single stone, amber coloured, set in a band of violet
enamel.

They were all dining at Government House that night, and she wore it,
striving to hide its brilliance amongst a number of other stones, but it
glared out yellow and baleful as a tiger's eye.  Lady Angela was the
first to spot it.

"What a glorious stone!  I do so love a yellow diamond.  Is it out of
the famous Montague mine, or a mere de Beer's?  Journalism must pay,
dear Viwie!"

She gave a little silvery laugh that rippled up Vivienne's spine like an
asp, and left a poisoned wound.

Neither did a conversation carried on at her right in full hearing act
as an antidote.  A Judge of the High Court was telling his dinner
neighbour what a charming fellow de Windt was, and how they would all
miss him when he pulled out for the North.

"The country can't afford to lose men like that!  But they are real
lovers of the wild and won't stay when we begin to get too civilised."

"Yet de Windt himself is one of the most civilised fellows I've ever
met," said the Administrator.  "When all Colonials are like him, Africa
will begin to move."

"A Colonial?  _Pas possible_!" cried a woman.

"It is possible though.  He was born out here and spite of Harrow and
Oxford and a place at the Bar, Africa has him in her maw for good."

"The dear fellow would have been here to-night, if he had not been so
ill," said the hostess.  And the wretched Vivienne was thankful she had
been spared that ordeal at least.  But she held fast to her plan.  What
matter whether de Windt were a splendid fellow or not?  Since he loved
the wild, all the better for him--he wouldn't miss his gold mine!  She
felt herself growing harder and harder every moment.

"Millionaires must be made of tough stuff," she thought sardonically.
"Fine fellows!  I expect I shall begin to look like one soon.  Eyes like
flint with pouches under them, and a tiger trap for a mouth!  _Zut,
alors_!"

Thanks to Lady Angela the news was all over Buluwayo the next day that
she was wearing Montague's ring.  Even the fact that Cornwall came
bearing propitious tidings did little to quench Vivienne's rage.

"It's all right," he said.  "De Windt will take your offer.  The other
people are keen as mustard and want to go higher, but he says he
wouldn't sell to them at any price."

"I want it fixed up at once," she said feverishly.

"As soon as you like.  He asked me to hustle it along too, in case you
changed your mind.  The poor fellow has had a bad go of fever, but the
news quite cheered him up, and he'll be about in a day or two.  He seems
greatly pleased at your wanting the place."

Vivienne was assailed by a choking sensation, and a bitter flavour came
into her mouth, but she knew that as a prospective millionaire she must
get accustomed to such discomforts.  They were part of the training.  As
also was the skilful fencing she began to practise on the unsuspecting
Montague.  Certainly it was a case of Greek meeting Greek, but sometimes
it seemed to her more like a duel between a sucking dove and a serpent.
And she was not the dove.  A London journalist had once said to her that
he believed all women were natural-born crooks, and now she began to
believe it.

"The black drop was in me all the time," she thought bitterly.  "But it
has taken Africa to bring it out!"

Although the negotiations for the sale went forward apace, they were not
pushed on fast enough to please her, and she almost worried Cornwall out
of his wits in her determination to have the thing signed and sealed
before de Windt was well enough to get about.  She did not yet feel
quite hardened enough in the ways of millionaires to be able to face
over a deed of sale the man whose gold she was stealing.

Another miserable part of the transaction was the receiving of Wolfe
Montague's cheque.  That was a bad moment.  The paper burnt her hand
like flame.  But she examined it carefully, and pulled Montague up
sharply when she found that it was drawn on a local Bank.

"That would never do," she said firmly.  "I cannot have my affairs all
over Buluwayo."

"I thought you wanted it for immediate use," he replied suavely, "and
Banks don't talk."

"I wouldn't trust them," she averred; "I give my confidence to few."
But she smiled her confidence in him at least with such lovely eyes that
he went away with content in his heart to arrange the matter on such
lines as only millionaires can command.  Forty-eight hours later the
money was to hand by cabled draft from London on the Standard Bank,
Buluwayo.

The same morning Vivienne went for the first time to look at the farm.
Montague's carriage was at her disposal as usual, and by the aid of a
small local map she was able to direct the groom.  They calculated that
the distance there and back could be easily covered in a couple of
hours, and that she could get back in plenty of time to prepare for a
ball which the magistrate was giving that night in the Court House.

The farm lay out towards the Matopos, along a dusty, sun-baked road, but
Vivienne, well shaded in the luxuriously cushioned body of the carriage
noticed neither dust nor heat.  The excitement of the gamble for money
was in her veins, and she was telling herself how good a substitute it
made for happiness.  The flickering glance of envious hatred Lady Angela
had shot at her from under a white umbrella on the sidewalk was part of
the game that she was in now, up to her nostrils--the game which, though
the weapons were sheathed in silk and the blows prepared behind honeyed
smiles, was just the same old sweet game, governed by the same old sweet
law, that was in the beginning and shall be in the end--the law of Club
and Fang!

"What is the use of pretending I am too good for it, and was made for
better things?" she meditated, and her smile took the little bitter
twist that was now becoming habitual.  With it still on her lips, she
looked over the side of the carriage into a pair of grey eyes full of
veld light and far places.  A dog-cart containing two men had passed and
gone, but not too soon for her to recognise Kerry and see an answering
flash of recognition in his eyes.

Gone too her satisfaction, such as it was, in the gamble and the game.
Fever died out of her veins and her heart lay cold as a stone.  She
looked not a girl, but a pale tired woman of thirty when she stepped out
of the carriage and climbed over the little sloping kopjes that gave a
view of the six thousand acres that would some day be a famous gold
mine.  Silent, lovely acres they were, full of colour and peace.
Low-spreading trees standing alone, scattered purple rocks on which lay
patches of rust red as blood, a carpet of wild grasses and little
star-shaped veld flowers.  Here and there great boulders were pitched
together with enough earth to harbour a spiking tree and trailing
creepers.  Some lines of red gum had been planted and in their shadow
stood a little thatched hut, before whose door, its slender branches
tapping the thatch, grew a little tree of the laburnum class, laden with
clustering golden bloom that gave a lovely scent.

A sudden poignant regret, stronger than herself, rushed through her,
that the peace of these brooding acres of loneliness should be destroyed
by what lay hidden under them.  In imagination, she saw the dirt and
debris of a new gold diggings, the purple rocks shattered by dynamite,
trees and flowers torn out and lying dead, the little perky sand-blooms
trodden down.  All for gold to poison the hearts of men and buy the
souls of women as hers had been poisoned, bought!

Was it too late now to repent, and instead of digging out the gold keep
the land as it was, silent and peaceful?  Go and live in that little
thatched hut with the tree by the door?  She dreamed with the thought a
moment then turned bitterly away.  The land was not even hers unless she
could pay for it with the gold that came out of it!  It was Montague's
as _she_ was Montague's until she repaid the thousand pounds.  She must
go back to the scheme of avarice and duplicity she had entered into with
eyes open and heart greedy for power and revenge.  Her path was clear
before her.  It had nothing to do with peace and beauty and nothing in
it that was noble, but it was her path.  As she got back into the
carriage and drove away, she knew that the memory of that place would
haunt her all her days.

"Another restless ghost to walk the weary corridors of memory!" she said
to herself.

Cornwall banished it for a while with the business of signing the
transfer deed, but at the dance given by the magistrate that night it
returned.  A pair of eyes looking at her across space and gems and
jewels, as once she had seen them stare across the veld, brought back
the ghost and made it seem a very alive thing.  She had never seen Kerry
in the evening dress of convention before, and tried to feel astonished
that he should resemble a distinguished man of the world rather than a
sort of Boer.  Inexplicably, as she stared, she forgot everything except
to notice how worn and ill he looked.  Over the shoulder of her partner,
she met his clear gaze, and it became curiously and inextricably mixed
in her memory with the lovely peace of the land she had visited that
day.  It was hot for dancing, and most people were beginning to meander
out of doors and stay there.

"I want to introduce to you a great pal of mine--Kerry de Windt," said
her partner, Marshall Brunton, who was also her host the magistrate.
"May I?"

"Kerry de Windt?" she answered slowly.

"A splendid chap.  He's here to-night, after a bad go of fever and
pneumonia he got somehow on his way up-country."

"On his way up-country?" she repeated mechanically.

"It appears that he was coming up by coach but left it at Palapye to go
off on a hunt for a little child that was lost from some waggons.
Everyone had given up the search, but he found the child away in a wild
krantz, starving, with an old mad Bechuana boy."

"Was it's mother alive?"  Vivienne had a sickening vision of that poor
mother sitting, hat in hand, outside her hut.

"He got back just in time to save her reason.  Queer fellow!  We'd never
have known anything about it from _him_, of course.  The story came up
by wire from Palapye."

"Is that he talking to Lady Angela Vinning?"

"Yes.  Shall we go over?"

"No.  Take me out into the air please," she faltered.  Her face was
white as death.  So _he_ it was whom she had robbed!  Kerry de Windt!
The man who had not only saved the child's life, but herself, from God
knew what worse horrors than death!

It was out in one of the verandahs, dimly lit by Japanese lanterns, that
he was brought and introduced to her.

"You two should find plenty to talk about, as you both know all about
being lost on the veld," said the host gaily, and hurried away to other
duties.

They stood looking at each other.  She wanted to cry out something, but
she did not know what it was.  His face was very haggard with an irony
she had never known about his mouth.  In the end, all her stiff lips
found to say was:

"I am glad you are better of your illness."

"Thank you.  I have something on which to congratulate you also, it
seems."  The flavour of irony was on his tongue as well as on his lips.

"I did not know it was your land," she stammered, and he stared a
moment.

"Oh, _that_," he said carelessly.  "You're welcome.  It's not the loss
of that I mind."

There was a silence.  They had sat down in a dim corner.  At last her
voice came faintly.

"What then have you lost?"  She hid her hand on which shone the yellow
diamond.

"Something I shall get along very well without in future, I dare say--
faith in women."

She couldn't bear the bitterness of his tone and words.  They hurt more
than if he had taken a knife to her.  Yet a miserable pride and wrath
made her pursue the subject to the last fence.

"You speak as though it is some fault other than your own?"

"_You_ know whose fault it is--whose hands have robbed me," he said
fiercely; "whose lips have given to another what once they gave to me."

"Never, never!"  The words broke involuntarily from her lips, though
what it was she denied so furiously was not quite clear at first.

"You will not deny that for a few moments at least, I had a right to
believe that you gave them to me?  You kissed me back that morning."

She said no word at that, only put up her hand to her eyes for a moment
as though to shut out something.  The gesture brought into sight the
yellow diamond, and with a finger he scornfully indicated it.

"Is not that a symbol of what I have lost--and another gained?"

Even as he spoke the large shadow bore down on them of Montague come to
expostulate concerning a sit-out dance that was booked to him.
Vivienne's voice, low, but very clear and cold, cut short his plainings.

"This ring is merely the symbol of a business arrangement between myself
and Mr Montague.  He very kindly lent me a sum of money with which to
make a good speculation.  I went to him in preference to applying to a
money-lender, and in honour of my confidence in him he asked me to wear
this charming stone.  When I return the money in three months' time or
less, I also return the ring.  Is not that exactly how the matter
stands, Mr Montague?"

"I believe it is," responded Montague with exceeding dryness, and
looking anything but amiable.  The unexpectedness of the attack took the
wind out of his sails.  He would have had more pleasure in bomb-shelling
de Windt than making any statement of the kind.

"That is all then, thank you," said Vivienne calmly.  "I shall have
finished my talk with Mr de Windt in about five minutes' time."

Millionaires in South Africa are not accustomed to such treatment, and
if Montague had been followed he might have been heard to mutter in his
wrath that she could finish her conversation with de Windt in Hades if
she liked.  The principal fact, as far as Vivienne was concerned, was
that he departed.  De Windt too had risen, his haggard face grown very
dark.

"Evidently there is nothing further for me to do but apologise, and get
out.  Your highly interesting conversation with Montague has made that
clear, at least."

"Do you mean to be insolent?" she asked slowly.

"I hope not," he said with steady scorn; "only to reassure myself that
your arrangements and speculations never have been and never can be any
concern of mine."

"That is not quite correct.  The speculation referred to had to do
directly with you.  The money I borrowed was to buy your farm."

"Indeed!  Well, in that matter at least I have reason to congratulate
you.  It is going to turn out a good spec."

"Ah! and how is that?" she peered at him curiously.

"The land has a rich gold reef running through it.  You will in all
probability be able to re-sell for several hundred thousand pounds."

"And when did you know this wonderful thing?" she asked in a strange
voice.

"After I'd sent word to you by Cornwall that I'd sell.  Brain, the first
bidder, came and confessed that he and his partner knew about the gold
and had meant to `do' me.  His idea, of course, was that I should pay
him for the information by going shares and not letting you have the
land."

Vivienne's heart stood very still.

"By the way, I was driving back from his place when I met you this
morning.  We'd been inspecting the specimens his partner had prospected.
Cornwall has instructions to hand them over to you in the morning.
They are unmistakable."

"And in spite of all this you still sold to me?"

"My bond was given," he said curtly.

She had risen too, and they were facing each other--about them all the
chirping night things--peace everywhere except in their hearts.  Music
came faintly stealing from the dancing-room.

"So after all Africa has brought you luck," he said.

She trembled under the contempt his tone betrayed for that luck, but
something in her that wished to live would not be daunted by his scorn.
And that something spoke in spite of her, in a gentle, alluring voice.

"Do you think it is such great luck?  Can you from your heart wish me no
better?"

"The luck I would wish you entails advice you would never take."

"Try me," her voice was very low and sweet, with a broken note in it.
"Try me--Kerry."

He looked at her sombrely.  His face seemed to have grown more haggard.
At last he said: "If you lived in the wilds awhile, under happier
circumstances than those you have come through, the real woman in you
might have a chance to live... you would come to realise how rotten they
are, all these _lucky_ things you set such store by."

"Perhaps I know that"; the strong unfaltering force still had hold of
her and used her voice.  "Perhaps it is the wilds I am hungering for--
and the strange happiness of a morning on the banks of the Lundi--" Her
voice was almost a whisper.  He had to draw nearer to hear it, and
stayed staring with a fierce moodiness into her eyes.

"Do you mean?--Vivienne?"

"I think you know what I mean."  She lifted her lips to him, to take or
leave, and knew that if he left them they would go lonely all life long,
which was no more than she deserved who had played fast and loose with
love.  But he did not leave them.  Once more she tasted the strange
fragrant flavour of wild honey, and knew at last that this fantastic
land of strange flowers and heavy scents, of silence and song, cruelty
and beauty, was for her, as he was for her.  Africa was wild honey.  The
love of Kerry de Windt was wild honey, and she could never content
herself with any other.  It was good to be safe in her own place against
his heart.  Good to have about her the arms that would never let her go
back to a world which ate her heart and made her perform acts that
besmirched her soul.  But there was still that to tell which might
loosen his arms and send them empty away.  She held them tight, tight
about her while she told him the ugly story.

For a moment there had sprung up in her an almost overwhelming
temptation to hide the truth from him (he would never know unless she
told him, how she had taken advantage of stolen information to plot
against and rob him of his land and gold.  No one even guessed the
truth).

But the next moment she had torn out that temptation, and thrust it
away, ashamed.

"How base I must be if even love cannot purify me!" she cried.  "But it
shall--it _has_.  Listen Kerry."

In the end, he kissed the tears from her lips as once before he had
kissed them.  One more of the little crystal globes of illusion men have
about the women they love went smash perhaps, but he hid the pieces from
her bravely enough.  Only, he held her a little closer, and there were
no half measures about his conditions.

"You've got to give it all up and come with me--away up North--anywhere
I go--and not care where you're going to--and never look back--nor care
if you ever come back.  Is that understood?  We shall be poor--but by
God! we'll get something out of life that those who live in towns and
cities can't buy with all their gold."

"But your farm, Kerry?--the land that is rightly yours?"

"We couldn't touch it after all this buying and selling with borrowed
money, Vivienne.  Rightly or wrongly it is Montague's if he wants it--
and you bet he will want it--he must get it, together with the ring and
that other two hundred pounds."

"I shall have robbed you then after all?" she said sadly.

"No, only paid for our happiness.  Everything has to be paid for, dear.
We are lucky if we can pay with anything so cheap as money!  Do you
care?"

"No, no, if you do not.  I care for nothing except to be sure that I can
repay you for all I--"

He kissed away the rest with kisses that were as fierce and tender and
cruel as Africa herself.  "Oh! yes, you can repay me, be very sure of
that.  But it must be now.  _Now_!  You must come with me this very
night."

"To-night?" she faltered, trembling a little.

"Yes, to-night.  I'm never going to let you go again.  Brunton has the
power to marry us, and I know he will do it after these people are all
gone, if I put the case to him.  My waggons are lying all ready a few
miles from here.  They've been ready for days, waiting for me to be well
enough to start.  Will you come?"

She thought for an instant of what the world would say, the big world
across the sea, and this little portion of it in Buluwayo; the mocking
smiles and innuendoes of the women, the men's amazement--but only for an
instant, then found herself smiling; that side of life was finished with
now, a higher, fuller life waiting for her.

"Yes, Kerry," she said simply, "I will follow you to the end of the
world and the end of life."

De Windt was no man of half actions.  Within half an hour, Brunton had
been beguiled into consent and Mrs Brunton let into the secret.  A long
residence had bestowed upon the latter a taste for romance and a heart
prepared for anything in the shape of adventure that came along.  She
threw herself rapturously into the preparations for an after-midnight
marriage, and sent her own maid for enough things from Vivienne's hotel
to make up a hasty travelling trousseau; the remaining luggage was to be
sent for the next day.  One or two very favoured guests being intimate
friends of de Windt's were let into the secret and allowed to stay, the
rest went home all unsuspecting and never knew the news until next
morning.

The amazing thing was that Montague was one of those who stayed.
Vivienne had accomplished a short interview with him, and returned him
those things which were his with a brief _resume_ of the situation.  To
do him justice, he took it like a man, as well he might, when he was
like to come out of the affair richer by several hundreds of thousands.
For de Windt would accept no other solution of the money tangle than
that Montague take possession of the farm and all its treasures.  In
return, he accepted the loan of Montague's carriage in which to carry
Vivienne away to her new life.

In one of the small, sweet, exquisitely fresh hours before dawn they
were set down and left alone on the wide and empty veld.  The dusty road
along which they had come was beautified by wraith-like rays from a
passing moon.  Purple rocks had put on a silvery sheen.  The white
radiant stars burned like jewels in the blue veil of heaven.  Far hills
and shadowy trees rose silent and salient against the sky.  The spot
where the waggons lay outspanned was close to de Windt's old farm, in
the same area of brooding peace Vivienne had visited the day before--but
with how different a mood!  Then, Life had tasted bitterer between her
lips than the aloes of Death.  Now, her heart was clean of guile as a
white rose, and she was a red and glowing rose whose fragrance
intoxicated them both with the divine madness of love.  Old Africa took
them to her breast and they became part of her.

CHAPTER THREE.

COMMON OR GARDEN EARTH.

There always seems to be more ardour and vitality in blue-eyed people
than in others, and Diane Heywood and Maryon Hammond were both
blue-eyed--with a difference.  His were blue as the inner light of a
glacier, with something of the ice's quality in their steady stare--a
fighter's eyes, hard as a rock that you cannot break with an axe; the
kind of eyes that women forgive anything to.  Indeed Hammond had spent
most of his thirty-eight years sinning against women, and they forgave
him even unto seventy times seven; and that was as far as the Holy
Scriptures entered into the matter.  Like Napoleon he was a little
fellow when it came to measurements, but so alert, high-headed, and
graceful that no one would have guessed him to be something under
five-foot eight, and he had the swiftest, most silent feet in Africa,
whether for dancing, running, leaping, tracking a lion, or kicking a
nigger.  A copper complexion bestowed upon him by the land he loved, and
a small tan-coloured moustache above a somewhat traplike mouth made up
the rest of his equipment.  It may be gathered that he was no beauty;
but he was "the captain of his soul," such at it was, and he carried
himself as though the gods had elected him to be one of the eternal
captains of the earth.

Diane Heywood's eyes were long and deep and cool with shadows in them
like the shadows under far hills on a hot day, and that should have been
enough for any woman; but the gods had been good to her and added a slim
little nose that grew straight out of her forehead like a Greek woman's,
dragging her upper lip so high that there seemed nothing of it except a
red curve above another red curve and a short firm chin with a cleft in
it.  It was hard to tell what in all these soft curves and dimples
should suggest a pride of spirit almost insolent, a scorn of all things
that were not high and clear and noble.  It might have been something in
the tilt of her head, the turn of her mouth, or the unflickering
character of the shadows in her eyes; but whatever or wherever its
origin it was there for all men to read, and not the least of her
attractions when read; for all men, whether they know it or not, love
that quality of pride in women, recognising, dimly or clearly according
to their natures, that on it is based all fine and great things in the
generation to come.

However, if instead of possessing the beauty of a May Day Miss Heywood
had been the dullest and plainest of girls she would still have enjoyed,
for a time at least, the rather enchanting experience of having all the
men in Fort Salisbury buzzing about her like bees round a rose on a June
morning, and every woman hanging on her lips as if she were the Oracle
of Thebes.  For she had come straight from England and the charm of
"home" still hung about her even as the colour of "home" stayed in her
cheeks.  She had seen fields--little square fields with hedges growing
round them, and buttercups growing in them--plucked blackberries and
cowslips, ridden to hounds in the Black Vale; heard the jingle of hansom
bells, and 'busses rumbling on asphalt, and the boom of Big Ben; tasted
London fog, smelt the Thames; seen Charles the First riding down
Whitehall, and Nelson's cocked hat lost in the mist.  She, the latest
comer, had seen and done and heard all or any of these dear and
desirable things later than any of the homesick exiles in Salisbury;
therefore was she most dear and desirable beyond all things that be.

  "She was London, she was Torment, she was Town."

There were in Rhodesia women whom men loved or reverenced or tolerated
or disliked or desired as the case might be, but, for the time being,
one and all of these were neglected and forgotten for the society of
"the girl from home."

Five men were on the verge of proposing to her--one of whom by the way
was already engaged--when suddenly Maryon Hammond with his dog Boston at
his heels dropped up from his mining camp out beyond Mazoe.  And when
"Marie" Hammond set his gay, bad eyes on a woman's face, and his feet on
the path that led to that woman's heart, the other men were just wise
enough to drop out of the running and pretend they didn't mind.

Like all great passions, it did not take long to come to a head--only a
few afternoon rides across the short springy veld grass, a few moonlit
evenings with music in the house and loungers in the verandahs, a supper
or two up in the old Kopje Fort, and then the ball got up by Hammond and
his cronies at the club.

When, after the fifth waltz, Diane Heywood came into the ballroom from
the dim verandah where she had been sitting-out a dance with Maryon
Hammond, her eyes were like two violets that had been plucked at dawn
with the mists of the night still on them.  She had the lovely dewy look
of a girl who has been kissed in the darkness by the man she loves; a
girl whose heart has waked up and found itself beating in a woman's
breast.

They had known each other only a week, but it was plain to see what had
come to them.  She wore the news in her parted lips, her tinted cheeks,
and the little rumple of her hair.  He walked as one whom the gods had
chosen to honour, pride-of-life written across his face, yet in his eyes
a humility curious in Maryon Hammond.  He had met his Waterloo.

Some of the women gave little sighs, not in envy so much as in a kind of
sadness that certain beautiful things only come once in each woman's
life, however much she may try and repeat or give base imitations of
them; and most men felt a sort of warmth in their veins as they looked
at those two radiant beings.  But a number of people merely contented
themselves with feeling extremely glad that the career of Maryon Hammond
as a pirate in love was at an end.

For it must here be admitted that the spectacle of a woman holding out
her soul in both hands for Maryon Hammond to play with, or walk over, or
throw into the fires that burn and consume not, was not an altogether
novel one to some at least of those present; it had been witnessed
before in various parts of Africa--and the entertainment, it may be
mentioned, is not a pretty one when the man concerned is not worrying
particularly about souls.  People said that Marie Hammond took toll of
women's souls for something a woman had once done to his own, long ago
in his own country America; but none knew the rights of the story.

Then there was his friendship with the beautiful Cara de Rivas.  No one
had been quite sure how far, if at all, her soul had entered into that
matter; but it was certain that tongues had been set a-wagging, for
Maryon Hammond's friendship was a dangerous if fascinating thing for a
woman to possess, unless she happened to be the woman he was going to
marry.  And Cara de Rivas was already married.  That was the trouble.
For Nick de Rivas, a big, handsome, if slightly morose fellow was
plainly something less than sympathetic with his wife's mid-summer
madness; even though, until Hammond called his attention to the matter,
he had appeared to be blind and indifferent to the fact that he had a
pretty and charming wife.

There had been considerable relief felt when de Rivas in spite of his
home and large mining interests being in Mashonaland suddenly decided to
take his wife away on a trip to England.

"And no bones broken," sighed Rhodesians, though they sought in vain for
confirmation of that or any other legend in the stony stare of Maryon
Hammond.  They were a romantic people those Rhodesians in the far-off
days of 1896, with no rooted objection to illegal adventure, but though
Hammond was neither good nor beautiful he had endeared himself to the
country in many ways and everyone was glad to think that his stormy
career was likely to come to an end in the peaceful harbour of marriage
instead of in some more tragic fashion.  And no one could help rejoicing
that Fate had arranged for the advent of Jack Heywood's sister while the
de Rivas were still away, and that the whole affair was likely to be
fixed up before the de Rivas' return which, by the way, after the lapse
of nearly a year had already been signalled.

The Hammond-Heywood engagement then, was announced about two weeks after
the ball at the Club, though everyone knew perfectly well that it had
been signed and sealed, so to speak, on that night, the extra two weeks
being thrown in as a concession to conventionality and a sort of bonus
to the men who had been about to propose.  Besides Miss Heywood had a
family in England whom it was Hammond's business to consult and beguile,
and consultations and beguilements take time as well as money when they
have to be conducted by cable.  In the meantime, it was plain to see
that Love had found Maryon Hammond at last, and that he was loved openly
and gladly back.  It was for all the world to see--as patent as the
silver stars on a purple African night.  He would walk rough-shod over
everybody in a drawing-room or cricket-field or polo-ground to reach her
side, and she would openly and obviously forget everybody else in the
place and in the world when he was there.  No matter how big or how
curious the crowd these two were alone in it when they were together.
People said that it must have been a strange, almost piquant, sensation
to Hammond so expert in secret intrigue, so versed in the dissimulation
and duplicity of illegal adventure, to be at last conducting a love
affair in the open, reckless of the eyes of men, and the tongues of
women, because for once the woman in the case had nothing to fear!  Be
that as it may, a passion so fine and frank and careless had never
before been seen in a land where great passions are not rare, and
Salisbury genuflected before it in all reverence and admiration.

It was at this propitious juncture that the de Rivas elected to return.
Their home was not in Salisbury but about seventy miles off, out Mazoe
way too, and incidentally not above ten miles from Hammond's own camp,
but they put up at a hotel in town for a week or two to give Mrs de
Rivas time to recover from the fatigue of a long coach journey, and be
welcomed back by old friends.  Promptly all the women in the town went
to call, and take the news of the Hammond-Heywood engagement.

The Spanish Inquisition is no more, but the gentle art of putting the
question accompanied by the watching torture has not yet been lost.
Even when malice is absent, who can eradicate curiosity from the
feminine temperament?  Cara de Rivas' dearest and most intimate
Inquisitors were tender for her, however.  They considered it only human
that they should desire to know how she was "taking it," but they had no
coarse intent of putting questions.  Merely they hoped to extract a few
answers--eyes and lips and incidentally clothes tell so much!

And behold! two of the answers were entirely unexpected.

The first was that Cara de Rivas was as deeply in love with her husband
as he was plainly and profoundly in love with her.  This was for all the
world to see and all the world proclaimed it instantly; but the other
and charming piece of news was more subtly distributed.  Women conveyed
it by means of their eyebrows, with benign little smiles, and cryptic
remarks, such as that--"It was all for the best;" "It would make such a
bond"; "No more dangerous friendships;" "_It_ would help the poor thing
to forget (if there was anything to forget)!"

Afterwards, all wise people let the story of "the dangerous friendship"
die and be buried, as all things that are dead as nails ought to be
buried and put out of sight.  And no one but a few scandal-lovers talked
of anything but the speedily approaching marriage.  The men of Salisbury
made Bernard Carr's life a torment to him, accusing him of being busier
than a hen with a tin chicken getting Maryon Hammond's trousseau ready,
while they went into the matter of that same trousseau with profane and
particular detail.  For Carr was Jonathan to Maryon Hammond's David, and
his love for his friend was outrageous and notorious, passing all
bounds.  Like the mother of Asa he had made an idol in a grove; and the
name of the idol was Hammond.  The other friend and partner of Maryon
Hammond was Girder, a dry, lean fellow of cynical disposition,
professing affection for neither man, woman, nor dog; but throughout the
long sun-smitten days and rain-soaked nights of that wet, hot January,
he was the only man who refrained from joining in the general ribaldry
at Carr's expense, just because Carr, the perfect friend, neglected his
own affairs to put Hammond's in order, so that the latter might in due
time marry and leave the country.  While Hammond, gay of heart and
wonderfully brilliant of face considering he had no looks,
irreproachable always in white duck riding-kit--_grande tenue_ for
Salisbury--idled away the sunlit, starlit hours with the moon of his
desire that knew no wane.

Strange that the affair of Maryon Hammond's trousseau should occupy the
minds and tongues of his friends far more than the threatened rising of
the natives!  But that was ever the way of Rhodesians in '96.  "Take
care of the affairs of your neighbour," ran their motto, "and the
affairs of the country will take care of themselves."  Besides, the
natives had threatened so often; it was absurd to be disturbed about
them.

The growing restlessness and insolence of the Mashona tribes kraaled in
the Salisbury, Mazoe, and Lomagundi districts--that is, within a
sixty-mile radius of the capital was in fact notorious, and many of the
outlying farmers and miners professed uneasiness; but the Native
Commissioners whose business it was to know such things scoffed at their
fears.  The notion of a rebellion amongst a tribe of people long
down-trodden and brow-beaten by the fierce Matabele, and now for the
first time enjoying prosperous and unharried life under the white man's
rule found the Commissioners sneering incredulously.

"Makalikas show fight!" scoffed Brebner, Head of the Native Department
and terror of every black face from Vryberg to Blantire.  "Great Lord of
War!  There is not one `liver' among the whole fifty thousand of them.
But of course they're cheeky--all niggers are when they get fat, and it
takes only one good season with the crops for that.  Moreover you must
remember that it is now about six years since the Matabele knocked
annual spots off them, and they are beginning to forget who it was
stopped that by smashing the Matabele.  Therefore they are cheeky, also
inclined to think they are great.  But you give me ten men and three
Cape `boys' and I'll settle the hash of any ten thousand of them in this
blessed country."

This last to the Administrator for whose permission he was nagging to go
and "remonstrate" with the ringleaders of a tribal fight down Victoria
way.  The Administrator smiled at the word.  He was aware that Brebner
invariably "remonstrated" with a riding-whip, but being a wise man and
one who had lived a great part of his life amongst natives he was also
aware that Brebner's mode of argument was the best and only one properly
appreciated by "our poor black brothers in South Africa" as they are
fancifully described at Exeter Hall.

So, eventually, Brebner and suite were allowed to depart upon their
hash-settling expedition.  They rode out one pink dawn and the veld
swallowed them up; thereafter peace fell upon Salisbury, and all talk of
a native rising was dismissed.  The discussion on Hammond's trousseau
was resumed at the Club.

Only Hammond himself did not think it good enough to stay on with his
bride in a country which seemed to him unsettled and breathing of war,
and he did not hesitate to state his intentions in spite of jeers.

"Why, hello, Marie!" they mocked him at the Club, and quoted remarks
from the Gadsbys:

  "White hands cling to the bridle rein!"

  "You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,
  That a young man married is a young man marred," etc.

"_That's_ all right," laughed Hammond serenely.  "But I'll take a year
off for my honeymoon just the same, and you fellows can put things
straight with the niggers.  Afterwards, I'll come back and congratulate
you and bring up the new machinery for the Carissima."

The Carissima Gold Mine belonged to Hammond and Carr and Girder, and
looked like panning out wealth untold in the near future.

"Oh, you're crazy, Marie," said Billy Blake, Head of the Mounted Police,
striving to be patient with the renegade.  "Love has gone to your head.
There isn't going to be any row with the natives.  Compose yourself, my
son."

Hammond composed himself as requested in a large lounge chair, his feet
on another.  Leisurely, and with obvious enjoyment of his pipe he
explained that in _his_ opinion Love and War were each good and great
and highly desirable things, but he preferred them separate.

"They don't mix," said he; "so we'll divide them this time.  You can
have the war all to yourself, Blake, and I'll--" he flushed under his
copper skin and added gravely, for he made and took no jests on the
subject of his amazing happiness, "It's a long time since I've seen
Kentucky--I'll take a trip home."

"Oh, you ought to take medicine, Marie--"

"Take a rest--"

"Take a drink--"

"Man, I tell you--"

"Show me the chief of these tin-pot Makalikas who has got the gall to
fight--"

"Why, you've got nerve to clear out--"

They clamoured and jeered about him, but he remained cool.  His personal
courage was too well known for there to be any doubt of it.  He had more
than earned his laurels as the most daring of scouts in the Matabele
trouble of '93, and many another "little war," and could afford, if so
inclined, to trim himself from top to toe with white feathers without
likelihood of being misunderstood.  So he left them to wrangle it out
among themselves, and it being after dinner and a whole three hours and
a half since he last saw Diane, he went to call on her at the house of
Mrs Tony Greville, and Boston, as usual, slouched beside him.

Now Boston as a dog and a gentleman deserves a few words to himself.  He
was a large, dust-coloured bull-terrier whom Hammond had raised from
puppyhood, and in whose muscular carcass the man had by rigid training
developed many of his own physical characteristics--that is to say,
though Boston was of large ungainly build and always appeared to
flounder rather than to walk, he was really as speedy as a greyhound,
brave as a lion, and silent in his movements as Fate herself.  He could
track down anything, and scout with the best man in the country (who
happened to be his master), but he spent most of his time tracking that
same master; for it was one of the practical jokes and never-failing
joys of Salisbury to hide Hammond from his dog.  Boston would go through
fire and water to regain his love--even the great Ice Barrier wouldn't
have stopped him long--but the moment he had Hammond in sight he would
assume an air of cynical indifference, and with his hands in his
pockets, so to speak, lounge up and sling himself down with a weary air
as though he'd given up all idea of finding what he was searching for,--
certainly not Hammond at all!  As for Hammond, he loved his dog as he
loved few men; it is doubtful whether, if asked to choose between Boston
and his best friend for company in exile, he would have chosen the man.

Knowing full well for what destination his master was now bound, Boston
presently went ahead, and before Hammond had reached the house of Tony
Greville, where Miss Heywood was staying because Tony Greville was Jack
Heywood's best friend, Boston had returned to report that Miss Heywood
was not in her usual place in the verandah.  Neither was she in the
drawing-room; and search by the servants found her absent also from her
bedroom.  It was only when Boston set his blunt nose towards the
Gymkhana Ground that Mrs Greville remembered to have seen Diane
strolling off in that direction directly after dinner.

"She's not quite herself this evening, I think, Marie.  There were a lot
of women here when she got in from her ride with you, and I fancy she
overheard something she didn't like.  That wretched little gossip Mrs
Skeffington Smythe was here."

Mrs Greville looked a little anxiously into his face, and the hard,
blue eyes looked back unflinchingly, but as he walked swiftly in the
direction of the Gym Ground, alone and with his mask off, his face
showed signs of strain.

The night under a rising moon was clear as crystal, and he had no
difficulty in descrying Diane's figure across the course where he and
she since their engagement was announced (escaping for a little while
from an army of friends) often walked in the evenings.  Some of their
dearest moments had been passed sitting where she now sat on the pile of
heavy timber by the Grand Stand.

Boston, arrived before his master, sprawled at Diane's feet, and she was
gazing before her at the moonlight coming up in waves from the horizon,
flooding all the land with cold silver light.  Something colder than the
moonlight gripped the man's heart for a moment, but he held out his
hands to her and spoke her name as though he had nothing to fear.  She
stood up quickly and put out her hands too--but with a difference; in
her gesture there was a subtle suggestion of defence, of warding off
something--and when he would have taken them in his, she drew back.

"No, Marie--not yet--there is something you must tell me--"

He stared at her.  She was deadly pale, but the moon itself was not more
composed, and her eyes had the same steady glance as his own.  Her
question was spoken in a very low voice.

"Were you ever in love with--another man's wife?"

His face darkened.  Prepared as he was, the unexpected form of her
question took him unawares.  He had anticipated something to which he
could give a firm, clear denial--but to this, what could he say, who had
so much on his conscience!

"_You_ ... listening to scandal, Diane!" he said at last, and the
reproach in his voice reached home.  She faltered a moment, not
answering at once, and they stood looking at each other, less like
lovers than two duellists measuring each other's strength.

"I will believe anything you tell me, Marie," she said gently, at last;
"I ask nothing better than to hear that it is only scandal."

He could not afford to hesitate any longer.

"If you are referring to my friendship with Mrs de Rivas, I may say
that in _that_ at least I am innocent.  Her husband neglected her; I was
sorry for her; our so-called friendship was a concerted plan to bring
him to his senses, and it worked like magic.  They are now extremely
happy."

But he had waked something new in Diane Heywood; she looked into his
eyes with the cold curiosity of a child.

"Why should your friendship be so terrible a thing for a woman?  Why
should it bring a man to his senses?"

"Oh, dearest! for God's sake, don't ask questions the answers to which
will only hurt you?"

"But I must know, Maryon," she said proudly.  "I have never lived
amongst lies and shadows.  Everything must be clear and clean about me.
If you are innocent in this matter--of what is it then that you are
guilty?"

The mad longing of the unshriven soul for confession swept over him
then.  He too would have all clear and clean about him, for once and
all, cost what it might.

"Oh, just of being a blackguard," he said, and all the pent-up
bitterness, and self-mockery and self-loathing of years came out in the
low-spoken words.  "Just of being a scoundrel and a coward as far as
women are concerned--of robbing, looting--taking all and giving nothing
in return--playing pirate and cut-throat in the great game of love,
careless of what anyone suffered."

"_You_!" she whispered.  "_You_ whom I have looked upon as a knight of
chivalry--a Galahad--all that was fine and noble!"

"Oh!  Diane, I have never pretended to be any of these things--never
wanted you to believe it--I am only common earth--common or garden
earth.  But such as I am, I love you--I ask you to take me with all my
sins."

There was a long silence.

"But _why_, Maryon?--What changed you from the man God meant you to be,
to _this_?"

She loved him.  For all her wounded pride and anger and horror, for all
his black sins, she loved him, as women will love through everything, in
spite of everything; and she longed for some word of extenuation that
would justify the forgiveness she could not withhold.

"I loved a woman years ago, and she was faithless.  She left me for
another man.  My wife ran away with my best friend."

"_Your wife_?"

"Yes.  Oh, I meant to tell you everything before you married me, Diane--
only, I was putting it off as long as possible.  I left America because
of that, and came out to this country.  Then, one day, after many years,
I found myself up here living next door to the very man and woman who
had been false to me--for whose sake I had been divorced in America so
that they might marry and be happy."

"_Divorced_?"

"And they weren't happy after all.  She loved him but he was neglecting
her, and she turned to me again for help.  I found a kind of cynical
amusement in helping her out.  So there you have the whole story,
Diane--not a pretty one, God knows, but, in this instance, not a guilty
one so far as I am concerned."

But the girl stood stammering at him, one word on her lips.
"_Divorced_?"

"You must believe that I meant to conceal nothing from you, Diane.  I
have already spoken to de Rivas and his wife and told them that you must
know--though no one else need ever suspect.  And if you choose it, if
you will still take me in spite of my sins--and, darling, I believe you
will, we'll get out of this country and go back to my own--"

"But, Maryon," she broke in, despairingly, "you do not seem to
understand that this ends everything between us.  I am a Catholic--do
you not realise?"

"A Catholic?  I don't care what you are--"

"But don't you know that we do not recognise divorce--that in my eyes
you are still her husband--will be her husband until one of you dies?"

It was he who stood now staring and stammering.

"You would let your religion come between us--separate us?"

"Oh, Maryon--my religion is _me_--It is what I feel myself--it is deep
in me.  One cannot escape from what one has felt and believed all one's
life."

"But the thing is impossible," he cried wildly, fiercely; "I cannot lose
you.  You must leave your religion--What does a good woman want with
religion?--Our Love shall be your religion--_I_ will be your religion--I
will never let you go."

"Hush, Marie, you don't know what you are saying," she said gently.  "We
must part.  I can never, never marry you."

And despite her gentleness she stood like rock against the battery of
his words, though he reasoned, pleaded, beguiled, even cursed, in his
pain and wrath.  Her heart turned to water, she was sick with love and
pity for him, but through all she clung to her faith as a sailor might
cling to a rock in a blinding, wrecking storm.  For nothing he could say
could she contemplate treachery to her people, her life-long principles,
her God.  Not so does the Catholic Church train its daughter against the
hour of temptation.

When at last in the bitter madness of defeat and loss he caught and
crushed her in his arms, kissing her savagely, she stayed silent, too
proud to struggle in those iron arms, but cold, cold as snow; until at
last the cold purity of her penetrated him like a lance of ice, piercing
his heart.

"Forgive me!--forgive me, Diane--I am a brute--I am mad!" he muttered,
and stumbled away into the night.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

After a night of drenching rain, the camp out at the Carissima Mine lay
sparkling in the morning sunshine.  It was five a.m. with the promise of
a golden day.  Birds were twittering in tree and bush and wet leaves
flickered and twinkled like diamonds, throwing off a myriad points of
light.  From the thatched roofs of the half dozen large huts in the
clearing, steam arose, mingling with the blue spirals from newly kindled
fires.

Hammond dressing leisurely in his hut looked out through his open door
and the beauty and promise of the day seemed to take him by the throat,
for he turned away from it with a face darkened and convulsed.

"God!  What a day!" he groaned as a man might groan who has had a knife
jabbed into him.  For it is thus that Nature hunts and hurts those who
loving her are yet a law unto themselves.  Since he had lost Diane, all
beautiful things struck at him with wounding, hurtful hands.

He had a sudden longing to let work go to the deuce for that day, to
take horse and his desolate heart away to some lonely wild place where
he could be absolutely alone, unobliged to speak or be spoken to by any;
but he knew that it was impossible to think of such a thing.  Girder and
he were the only white men in the camp, and he could not leave all the
work to Girder.  The Mine Manager had been laid low by fever, and the
sub-manager had taken the Cape cart and driven off with him the night
before to Salisbury Hospital.  As for Carr, he had been away on business
for some days in the Lomagundi district.

It behoved Hammond to get his breakfast over and start for the native
compound.  There was a matter of three hundred boys or so to round up
and hustle to their labours down the shaft.  He threw a glance round for
his boots, a special pair he kept for negotiating the wet sloppy clay at
the bottom of the mine, and, seeing them nowhere, whistled for his body
servant.

"My mine boots, Pongo," he jerked in the vernacular at the sleek-eyed
Mashona who answered his signal.  It transpired that the boots had been
forgotten and were still in the saddle-hut covered with the dust and mud
of yesterday!  After receiving Hammond's comments on the subject, Pongo
disappeared in a hurry to fulfil his neglected task.

"And tell Candle to rustle with my breakfast," roared Pongo's lord like
a lion in pain, and Candle at the sound did not need telling, but
rustled to such good effect that in five minutes breakfast stood
steaming on the rough wooden table that was pitched under a tree in the
middle of the clearing.  Girder very spick and span in white moleskins
emerged from another hut, and Hammond, dressed all but his boots, and
impatient of waiting, thrust his feet into a pair of silk slippers sent
him at Christmas by his sister (and brought out by accident to the camp)
and strolled out to join his friend at the table.

The three partners had been in camp for nearly six weeks.  After that
night on the Gymkhana Ground, Salisbury had no further hold for Hammond
and he left the next morning, accompanied by Carr, grave and
unquestioning, and followed a day or two later by Girder.  He had never
opened his lips on the subject of his changed plans, and he did not need
to.  Carr knew that the trouble was deep, and guessed the cause.  Later,
Girder brought the news of the broken engagement as briefly announced by
Jack Heywood with whom Hammond had encompassed a short interview before
leaving.

With the exception of a remark or two on the subject of the storm during
the night, the two men took their breakfast in silence.  Girder was at
no time a talkative fellow, and, of late, Hammond's mood seldom invited
gaiety.  This morning he had not yet recovered from the savage misery
that had smitten him in his hut, and still preoccupied was not his usual
observant self, or he would have noticed something unnatural in the
atmosphere of the camp.

About three hundred yards off from where they were sitting, a
construction of heavy beams forming a rough hauling gear marked the
mine's mouth, with the power-house and a number of small shanties
grouped beside it.  Beyond, and almost hidden by this group of buildings
was the _kraal_ or compound occupied by the natives who worked the mine.
It was merely the usual collection of fifty or more rough _dagga_ huts
with thatched roofs drooping almost to the ground and lop-sided like a
lot of old battered straw hats, surrounded by a high dagga wall; and
from it came the usual morning sound peculiar to Kaffir kraals--a low
humming sing-song of voices, with an occasional _tap_ or _boom_ on a
vessel of metal or skin.  What Hammond should have noticed and did not,
was that his natives were humming a war-song--one of those monotonous
chants, flat and unmusical, yet full of some hidden power to stir the
blood of a savage to dreams of reeking assegai and the crashing thud of
knobkerry upon skull.  The few "boys" loitering among the white men's
huts, all personal servants, cast furtive glances tinged with surprise
at the indifferent faces of the white men.  Certainly _Inkos_ Girder was
but a new hand--only a year or two in Africa; but _Inkos_ Hammond was an
_induna_ [Chief; captain] who knew all things, and had fought in many
Kaffir wars!  _Clk_!  Surely he must hear that song in the kraal and
know its meaning!

Hammond indeed would probably have waked in a moment to a sense of
something wrong, but, as it happened, his attention was suddenly averted
by the sight of a man on horseback tearing full-tilt towards the camp.

"What the--"

"Who the--" They both stood up as the horse came clattering into the
clearing, and its rider gasping and haggard flung himself down.  He was
one of de Rivas' assistants out at the Green Carnation Mine--a young
Scotchman called Dent, well known to them both.

"The natives are `up.'  They've murdered everyone in our district except
de Rivas and his wife," he burst forth.  "You fellows had better get
your horses and scoot for Mazoe before--."

"Steady, Dent," said Hammond in a voice like cold steel.  At the first
mention of trouble, he had thrown his eye around and in a flash heard
and seen the danger signals about him--his servants' faces, the timbre
of the song in the kraal, the sudden dead silence which, with the
horseman's coming had fallen on camp and kraal, and--_the rustle of feet
creeping up behind the mine-head shanties_!

"Pull yourself together.  My boys are observing you.  Get your revolver
from your hut, Girder, and all the ammunition you can lay hands on, but
keep them out of sight."  (He had his own revolver on him--too wise a
citizen of Africa ever to be without it.) "Sit down, my dear fellow," he
now added heartily to Dent, and called for fresh coffee, sitting down
himself too, but with his face towards the mine-head.  Girder coming
back casually from his hut resumed his chair.  Speaking in an ordinary
voice, smoking, and pouring out coffee, Hammond questioned the Scotchman
and elicited facts.

The natives had set to work at four o'clock that morning, and
systematically visiting every farm, hut, and tent within the district
had butchered the surprised and defenceless occupants.  Everyone at the
Green Carnation taken unawares had been knobkerried or assegaied to
death--except de Rivas and his wife who got warning in time to barricade
themselves in their ranch.  Dent had been with them and the two men had
managed to drive the demons off for a time, but it was certain that they
would return.  In the circumstances, de Rivas had ordered Dent to try
and get away by means of an old mine working that came right up close to
the back verandah of the house and bring help to them, for Mrs de Rivas
was a sick woman and could not travel any distance except in comfort,
and well protected.

"They can't last out long," finished Dent dismally.  "Half their
ammunition is gone--Mrs de Rivas is in hysterics most of the time--if I
don't get help they'll be done for in a few hours--I must push on to
Mazoe and--"

His sentence was broken off by the smart snap of a revolver.  Hammond
was firing across Girder's shoulder, not once but many times.

_Snap--phit!  Snap--pht!  Snap--pht_!  And the grim eyes of the man
behind the revolver snapped and flashed too, as he picked off one after
another of those who led the advancing horde.  In less time than it
takes to write it, five of the leaders were groaning in the dust, and
the murderous band behind had fallen back dumbfounded, staring like
fascinated rabbits at the man who now advanced on them still covering
them with that gleaming deadly revolver and his ice-cold deadly glance.
At last, he flung them a few brief words in their own tongue.

"Get down to your work in the mine.  Anyone who loiters will be shot--
like these things here."

They gazed at the "things" for a silent moment, then cringing before the
white man like the dogs they were, they dropped assegais and knobkerries
in the dust and retreated sullenly, step by step, to the mine mouth.
Girder close behind Hammond, opened the little gate leading to the
enclosure round the shaft and hustled half a dozen boys into the
power-house to set the cage going.  Then, one by one, with downcast
looks and modest mien the boys filed into the cage and were lowered in
little companies down the mine.  Hammond stood by silent, dominating,
the sunshine glinting on his revolver barrel, Boston, casual and
indifferent, lounging beside him.  The two other men, unobliged even to
draw their guns, contented themselves with speeding up an occasional
loiterer by means of a brisk application of the boot.  In the end, every
"boy" of three hundred was at the bottom of the shaft, except those in
the power-house.  Hammond approached them.

"You too--get in," he remarked briefly, and they got in, humble and
sleek, with air deprecative of giving so much trouble.  Dent and Girder
took possession of the power-house and worked the cage, for as is well
known, two white men can do the work of six natives any day in the week.
Afterwards they cut the steel ropes that held the cage and it fell
crashing to the bottom of the shaft.

"_That's_ all right," said Hammond at last.  "They've plenty of water,
and a couple of days with empty stomachs will take the cheek out of
them.  At the end of that time, if all goes well, we'll be here to let
'em up again--if not, so much the worse for them."

"The blessed tinkers!" was all that Girder permitted himself to remark.

"Now you fellows," said Hammond briskly, "take your horses and beat it
for Mazoe, hell-for-leather.  Get a party together--half a dozen guns
and make for the Green Carnation.  I shall go on ahead and help de Rivas
hold out."

"I'm coming with you," said Girder carelessly.  Hammond looked at him
coldly.

"You will kindly do as I ask you, Bill.  If you meet trouble between
here and Mazoe, as you probably will, and one of you is potted, there is
still a chance of the other getting in to give the alarm."

Girder merely smiled.  Hammond knew that obstinate smile, and he also
knew there was no time to lose.

"Don't be a fool, Bill," he said brusquely.  "We are not in this for
glory, or fun, or friendship.  Just remember there's a woman in the
matter, will you?--a sick woman.  What you two fellows have got to do--
or one or other of you--is to get together a big enough party to convey
her in a cart to Mazoe.  If you are delayed you will probably find when
you reach us that we have left the ranch and taken to the bush.  The
house won't be safe once the ammunition has given out--and I know the
country all round there like the palm of my hand.  There are plenty of
places we can lie doggo in until help comes.  But you must get help, and
get it quick.  Take the fresh horses, you've farther to go than I.  I'll
take Dent's.  Go on now, Bill.  Don't be pig-headed--and take charge of
Boston will you?  I don't want him with me.  Where is the beggar?"

No one knew.  A moment before he had been lounging idly against the
power-house, his tongue lolloping from his mouth, his eye expressing
boredom; a moment later he simply was not.  It is hard to say what
instinct had bidden him make himself scarce in a manner as swift and
unobtrusive as possible, and turn into a motionless, sand-coloured
ant-heap about fifty yards from the road down which anyone leaving camp
must pass.  No one had time to look for him and no one would have found
him in any case.  Hammond let loose a bad word, gave Girder's hand a
parting grip, and skimmed out of camp on Dent's horse.

Within a quarter of a mile of the Green Carnation, he dismounted, and,
leaving the horse in the bush, advanced under cover and with great
caution towards the ranch.  It was then that the rough rocky ground and
thorns under foot brought him the realisation that he was still wearing
the pair of silk slippers made and sent him by his sister for a
Christmas present.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a little dell-like place--not more than ten feet by six, hollowed
out by the heavy streams that in bad weather came rushing down the
slopes of the kopje above it, darkened by the thick bush all round, full
of small sharp stones and thorns, and red ants that stung like wasps,
with not a single smooth tree trunk or flat rock to lean against.
Still, it was a hiding-place; and to three people it had been for as
many days, a haven and a home.  Three people--to say nothing of the dog!

It was indeed Boston who lay in one of those triangular positions which
only a dog can find reposeful, his head on a stone, his tongue lolling
languorously from his mouth, one eye closed, the other cocked on his
master.  For Hammond seated uneasefully upon a small rock, his arms
round his knees, his empty pipe in his mouth, was plainly busy on an
intricate problem, and Boston too was interested in the solution of that
problem.

Close beside them, touching feet with Hammond and the dog, de Rivas
half-lay, half-leaned in the cramped space, painfully shifting his
wounded leg every few minutes.  Between his lips was a thick white
mimosa thorn which he bit on when he shifted, as a wounded soldier might
bite on a bullet to keep in his trouble.  Mrs de Rivas lay sleeping on
the men's folded coats.

"Well--what next, Hammond?" asked de Rivas in a whisper.  They had been
obliged to whisper for days; the natives were all round them in the
bush, searching; but Hammond had chosen his retreat well, and the odds
were against discovery so long as they lit no fires and were not heard
talking.  It was characteristic of the man, however, that this business
of whispering annoyed him more than any of the risks and hardships of
the past few days.  To have to whisper on account of a lot of murdering
niggers!--When all he wanted was to get out and beat the brains out of a
score of them--and he would too if--

Mrs de Rivas gave a little moan in her sleep.  So he whispered, in
spite of his fierce desires.

"I shall start for Salisbury to-night."

"Salisbury!--on foot?"

"It's no use trying Mazoe.  Something's gone wrong there or Girder would
have been back by now."

"But Salisbury is seventy miles!"

"Sixty when you know your map."

"Well, sixty!--without food!  And you've got no boots!"

It was no use offering his own.  He was a big man and his feet were on a
generous scale.  As for Hammond, he could not forbear to smile when he
looked at the travesties from which his toes protruded--a few rags and
ribbons of dark blue silk.

"No; but I've got feet."

He had indeed--the most famous feet at Harvard in his time, and in
Africa at any time.  All the same, he cursed himself for criminal
carelessness in leaving his camp improperly shod; for he too knew that
sixty miles barefoot through an enemy's country, over krantz and kop and
rough unbroken ground, was not going to be the funniest thing that had
ever happened to him.  Still, they couldn't sit whispering here forever,
and Cara de Rivas had got to be saved.

She had stood the strain well up till now, but it was doubtful if she
would last out much longer.  _And she must not die_.  No woman in the
same case would be allowed to die if he could help it.  But only he knew
the stain and disgrace it would be on him to let her of all women die,
whose death would give him his heart's desire.

When de Rivas spoke again, his whisper had grown fainter.  His thoughts
appeared to have taken the same direction as Hammond's.

"How am I going to keep her alive, Hammond?  She can't go on without
water."

"I shall fill the can before I start, and you must try and make it spin
out for three days.  I promise you I shan't be longer than that."

Fortunately they had thought to bring a can with them in their hurried
escape from the ranch, and Hammond stole out every night and filled it
from the river not two hundred yards away.  De Rivas' wounded leg
entirely incapacitated him from doing anything; Hammond had been obliged
to carry him more than half the way on the night of their flight.

"Three days!" de Rivas was thinking to himself.  "He can never do it
even if he had boots!"

Three days was too short a time in which to walk to Salisbury and bring
back help.  Three days was only long when contemplated from the point of
view of a man whose larder is empty, and whose death lurks in the
shadows.

"What am I going to give her to eat?"

"I've thought of that too," said Hammond quietly.  The other man looked
up questioningly.  The problem of provisions had been a haunting one
ever since they arrived in their refuge.  If Hammond had a solution to
it now, why not before?  But Hammond was apparently not inclined to be
communicative.  He merely sat there staring at Boston; and Boston as
though suddenly aware of something personal in his master's attention
rose suddenly, and in his silent, floundering way came over and laid his
nose on Hammond's knee.  Hammond after a moment or so raised the dog's
head in his hands and looked into the golden brown eyes, tender and
trustful as a woman's, far more trustworthy than many women's.  Then,
for Maryon Hammond, he did a strange thing; he bent his head and kissed
his dog's nose.  De Rivas bit suddenly on the thorn between his lips,
and looked away.  He had seen Hammond's eyes, and it is not good to see
the eyes of a strong man in pain.  He knew now what Hammond meant to do
to keep him and his wife alive during the next three days.

When Cara de Rivas awoke from her long sleep of exhaustion it was dusk,
and she found herself alone with her husband in the dell.  She crept to
his side and kissed him with a whispered inquiry for the pain of his
wound.  Then:

"Where is Maryon?"

Unfalteringly, without the flicker of an eyelid, de Rivas repeated the
lesson in which Hammond had instructed him.

"He has gone to get water--and Cara,--he has had a great stroke of
luck--got a buck in a kind of primitive trap he fixed up last night.  We
shall have meat for several days."

"Meat--_but no fire_!" she said, a little spasm of horror contracting
her weary face.  He put his arm round her.

"Dearest, this isn't the time to be squeamish--for my sake, and for the
sake of our little kid to come--just think of it as sustenance--close
your eyes and get it down.  Lots of sick people have to eat raw meat by
order, and think nothing of it.  And thank Hammond--don't forget to
thank Hammond before he goes, for--all he has done for us."

"Before he goes?" she cried with frightened eyes.  "Where?  Why?"

Gently, with more confidence in his words than in his heart, he
explained Hammond's plan to her, and her eyes brightened.  She had faith
in Maryon's plans; they always "came off."  And it would be only three
days!  It was a long time--but Marie would come back with help, and they
would both he saved.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Suddenly, without a sound of his coming, Hammond was with them, carrying
the can of water, and something wrapped in long fresh grass.
Immediately Cara cried:

"Boston?  Where is Boston, Marie?"

"I parted with him down by the river," said Hammond, adding after a
moment: "He is busy with part of the buck I got."

He did not speak for a long time after that, seeming very intent on what
he was doing--tearing the sleeves of his coat in strips to bind round
his feet.  His shirt had been used up for de Rivas' wound.  After he had
finished this, the only preparation for his journey, he sat talking
cheerfully to Cara for awhile, asking for messages for friends in
Salisbury, and inviting her to choose the men she wanted for her "relief
patrol."  Hardly in keeping with these gay whispers were his words in de
Rivas' off ear, as he thrust his revolver into de Rivas' off pocket.

"I'll take yours instead.  It may serve to smash a skull with, at a
pinch."

Now de Rivas' revolver was empty; it was Hammond's that contained the
one cartridge for a certain emergency--the frightful emergency which all
brave men who take charge of women in a savage country must be willing
to face!  But Cara, whom this little incident chiefly concerned, knew
nothing of it.  Almost light-heartedly she bade Hammond farewell,
thanking him as her husband had told her for all he had done, far from
knowing how much that was, and how much it might be before the end.

At the last, de Rivas held out his hand and said hoarsely:

"If you don't mind shaking, Marie--and saying you forgive me?"

It was the first time since he stole Maryon Hammond's wife that he had
used the name that once in college days was sweet between them.  He
would hardly have dared now, but somehow he felt he owed it to Hammond's
generosity to dare, if only to let the other man smite him with the just
word of wrath.  But Hammond took his hand.  They were all in the shadow
of death.

"And me too, Marie?" whispered the woman through her tears.

"That's all right, Cara," he said gently, taking hers in turn.  A moment
later he had gone upon his way.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the Salisbury laager, which was the Salisbury prison put into a state
of defence, with sand-bags and waggons all round it and machine guns
pitched on every eminence, the air was charged with gloom and rage.  It
was not because of war; Rhodesians after '93 were inured to war and had
learned to accept philosophically its bitters with its sweets.  What
hurt them now was that this was not war, but black murder.  There had
been no decent open fighting--only secret, savage murder of men and
women in far places.  Murder--and worse!  Men bit their mouths close on
revolting stories that it would do no good for the women to hear; and
women came into laager, night after night, white-faced and sick of
heart.  The whole country was "up" in rebellion, but except in
Matabeleland there had been no actual fighting.  Overwhelming small
isolated bands of men cannot be called fighting--but it was the nearest
approach to it that the Mashonas had made.  That was what they had
attempted in the case of the Mazoe patrol.  On hearing that there had
been wholesale slaughter at Mazoe, and that the survivors (mostly women
and children) were huddled in a house waiting for the end, twenty-six
picked men had ridden out from Salisbury to the rescue.  They had
reached Mazoe just in time--and getting the women, children, and wounded
men into a waggon protected by sheets of corrugated iron, set out on the
return march to Salisbury.  These twenty-six men had had to fight every
inch of the way with thousands of natives, but not one dead or wounded
man of the gallant band was left by the wayside.  As they fell, their
comrades picked them up and thrust them into the waggon, and thus in
some wise or another came back one and every man of the famous patrol!

Carr with an arm shot off and his horse shot under him, was one of those
who had to lie helpless and raging amongst the women--raging because he
knew nothing of the fate of his best friend!  All that he knew was that
the bodies of Girder and Dent had been found on the outskirts of Mazoe.
One of the Carissima boys was reported to have stated that Hammond had
gone to the help of the de Rivas.  But it was now known that de Rivas'
place was burnt to the ground and not a living soul left at the Green
Carnation.  Small wonder that the bitterness of Carr's heart was as the
bitterness of the heart of Job in the last stage of his torment!

It was now generally believed that everyone in the mining districts who
had not managed to escape at the first alarm to Salisbury was of the
doomed and dead.  Diane Heywood looked into Bernard Carr's eyes and saw
that belief there and her face took a deeper shadow upon it.  From the
first entry of wounded refugees, she had offered her services to the
good nursing nuns, and striven in ardent labour and many a weary vigil
to dull her heart's fierce pain.  When once she and Carr had read each
other's misery he forgave her for what she had done to Hammond (though
he knew not what it was), and they were friends for ever after.  She was
often by his bedside, reading sometimes, or talking a little, but more
often both were silent, thinking of what they dared not speak.

Oh! to see his eyes again!  To know that he was still on God's fair
earth!--not cut down, beaten to his knees with knobkerries, assegaied by
foul cowardly brutes whose courage was only in their numbers!  Only to
know that he had had a fair chance--out in the open with a gun in his
hand, not trapped in a hut as so many had been!  But all that had
happened at the Carissima remained dark and unknown; and the mystery of
its fate lay heavy on the hearts of those in Salisbury laager.

Then late one afternoon shouts on the clear April air!  Shouts and
cries, hoots and yells of triumph from afar--nearer, nearer, until right
at the laager gates; then crowds of men rushing in, all thrusting,
heaving, shoving to be near a central figure--someone being borne high
on men's shoulders!

Diane, standing in the verandah of the gaoler's house where Carr lay
sick, shaded her eyes with her hand to see better through the sunset
rays.  They were calling Hammond's name--but was _that_ Maryon
Hammond?--that haggard, tattered wreck, brown with dirt, disfigured by
thorn-scratches and dried blood, ragged, shirtless, with bare arms
sticking through a sleeveless coat!

Yes, it was Maryon Hammond; he looked up at her as they carried him
past, and it was as though he saluted her with a sword.

Ah, God! if she could have gone to him and taken his head to her breast.
But how could she?--he was not hers but another woman's!  All she might
do was rejoice that a brave man still lived.  Blindly, with faltering
feet, she found her way back to Carr's room where she had been sitting
when the noise came.  She wanted to share the news with someone--someone
who loved him too.  Afterwards they sat silent in the twilight.  Carr
with a man's philosophy was content now and could possess his soul in
patience until Hammond came to him.  But Diane knew not what power
helped her to sit there so still, listening to the sounds in the gaol
yard.  For they had not discontinued for a moment, those sounds.  Always
men's voices continued to rise and fall, shouting excitedly, crying
Hammond's name, questioning, even it seemed remonstrating.  There was
much jingle of harness too, and the sound of horses being led out.  At
last, a wilder hubbub than ever, an uproar of mad hurrahs, cheer upon
cheer ringing on the evening air, then--the thud of horses' hoofs and
the rattle of cart wheels!

Some word he caught in all that wild bedlam of sound made Carr spring
out of bed and tear down the passage that led to the verandah, with
Diane Heywood running after him.

"What is it?  What is it?  Where is he?"

After the first amazed stare at this madman in pyjamas there were many
to cry him the news.

"He's gone back again!--What do you think of that?  After doing sixty
miles in his bare feet!--Gone back to get de Rivas and his wife!  Our
fellows, twenty of 'em were ready to go alone--but nothing on earth or
off it could stop him from going too--not the Judge, nor the
Administrator, nor an Archangel from heaven--said they could never find
'em without him--or might find 'em too late!  His feet are all to bits--
I tell you, man, he hasn't got feet any more--only some black currant
jelly!--They're so bad he has to ride in a cart!--but he _would_ go--he
_would go_.  Whether he'll ever come back again--with those feet--"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

But he did come back.  It took longer to bring in the two refugees than
it had taken Maryon Hammond to walk the distance in his bare feet, for
there was fighting to be done on the return journey; but Cara de Rivas
and her husband were safe and sound in Salisbury at last, none the worse
for their three days' vigil.

And once more a man riding on men's shoulders looked up at a girl in the
gaol verandah and saluted her with the blue glance of his eyes; and she
with her hand raised to her forehead saluted him in return, as a soldier
might salute a conqueror, her eyes full of pride.  For only she and he
knew how great was this victory in which lay their defeat.

"Do we think Victory great?"

"And so it is."

"But now it seems to me when all is done, that Defeat is great, and
Death and Dismay are great!"

Long before they came to fetch her, she had heard the news--the bitter,
tragic news.  It was on all men's lips.

"His feet are gone.  Nothing can save Marie Hammond's feet--the fleetest
feet in Africa!--gone!--done for!  _Nothing but amputation can save his
life--and he won't have it done_!"

It was true.  He refused to have it done.  He lay and laughed in the
doctors' faces.

"Take my feet off?  Leave me to spend the rest of my days on my back--or
crawling about the earth like a maimed rat?  Oh, no, my dear fellows!--
No job for you to-day?--nothing doing!  All right, I'll be dead before
morning if you say so.  That's not such bad luck either.  I think a good
long rest is indicated anyway.  I'd like a rest, by Jove!  Only I should
like to be left alone now, if you don't mind, with my pal Carr--and--Ah!
yes, if Miss Heywood would stay too--?  Leave us three alone, will you,
until the end?"

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Diane Heywood never left Salisbury.  A grave kept her there, and you may
find her there to this day, tending the sick and sad, helping all those
whose burdens seem too heavy for their shoulders.

CHAPTER FOUR.

WATCHERS BY THE ROAD.

The sky-line was scarlet from east to west, and above the scarlet lay
massed bronze.  The rest of the world was composed of tan-coloured
kopjes and rocks, and the road along which the Cape cart dolorously
crawled, resembled a river of dust rising in mountainous waves through
which the setting sun loomed like a blood-red heart.

It was the road from the Transvaal to Tuli, and the cart had been
travelling along it for hours, but was still many miles from the wayside
hotel where a night's rest for man and beast was waiting; and the
offside leader had gone dead-lame, while the other three horses appeared
to have lost all enthusiasm for life.  On the crest of a rise, the cart
came to a standstill, and they stood with hung heads and quivering
barrels panting under their lathered harness.  The driver descended; a
burly Cape boy, he had the thick mouth of a Hottentot and the hang-dog
swagger of a low-class Boer; but as far as horses were concerned he was
an angel from Heaven.  When he spoke to his beasts, they lifted up their
despairing heads trembling like lovers to his voice, seeming to stand
together again with fresh resolution while he rubbed the nose of one,
slapped another's soapy flank, and once more examined the leader's foot.
Afterwards he emitted a kind of resigned grunt and stood chewing a bit
of grass he had plucked in stooping.  The two men crammed in the body of
the cart with several dogs, guns, and a mass of shooting-kit looked on
grimly.  They were merciful men who hated to see a beast suffer, but
they also hated the prospect of a night on the veld without provisions
or blankets.  They were weary as only a day's travelling in a Cape cart
under the hot sun can make men weary; dead beat, begrimed, and hungry.
Moreover they were in a hurry to reach their destination; if they had
not been they would have waited for the weekly mail-coach instead of
chartering a special cart.

The significance of the driver's grunt was not lost on one at least of
them, a dark man burnt almost black, with hard blue eyes and a grim lip,
who looked as though with a red handkerchief on his head instead of a
slouch hat he would have made a first-class pirate.  Never handsome, a
broken nose, and a deep scar which began over one unflinching eye and
finished somewhere in the roots of his short thick hair had not softened
his appearance.  Yet no woman or dog (the two have strangely similar
tastes where men are concerned) would have glanced twice at the other
man (a well set up, good-looking fellow of thirty), while Dark Carden
was about.  The latter, however, if he returned the glances of women
with interest, also knew something of men and horses, and because of
this he now saw very well that the leader was done for and the driver
resigned to a night on the veld.  Disentangling himself from the
shooting-kit he threw himself out of the cart, and the dogs leaped after
him barking joyously.

"This is a damned look-out, Swartz!"

"Yes, Baas," assented Swartz, not unamiably.  "The leader's leg is gone
for store, and the others are done up.  We can't make Webb's to-night."

"How far is it?"

"About thirty miles yet."

Carden looked at the man in the cart.

"Feel inclined to tramp it, Talfourd?"

"Oh, Lord!" groaned Talfourd.  "Do you?"

"Not much!" said Carden smiling.  "We'll camp.  After all we've got the
buck."  He gave a glance to the back of the cart where a beautiful
little net buck still warm, but with the glaze of death over its eyes
was suspended.  Then his keen eye travelled swiftly over the surrounding
country.  The dust was subsiding, and it could be seen that they were in
a wild place of lonely kopjes and immense patches of grey-green bush.
Far off, taller, greener trees growing thick and close as moss 

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