Long Odds | Page 4

wine took more effect on him that it would have
done on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and
making him talk more freely than usual.
Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the
vestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion, his
shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen as any
hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung with
trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story
about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell them. Generally
he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.
"Ah, you brute!" he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of a
lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of
guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you have
given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I suppose, to
my dying day."
"Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised
to tell me, and you never have."
"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."
"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more port."
Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--
"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's country.

It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got into power--I
forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedi people
had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior, and
so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight away from
Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing to go into
the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that there were
one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined to have a try
for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough from
continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much.
"Well, I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful piece
of bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains running through it, and
round granite koppies starting up here and there, looking out like
sentinels over the rolling waste of bush. But it is very hot--hot as a
stew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is
autumn in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every
morning, as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to
creep from the waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to
be seen--only a long line of billows of what looked like the finest
cotton wool tossed up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist.
Out from among the scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though
there were hundreds of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands
of tons of rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty
was the beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote
one great word across the surface of the country, and that word was
'fever.'
"It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one little
kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some /maas/,
or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I was struck
with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and no dogs
barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place, though it
had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as the bush round it,
and some guinea fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes right at the
kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before going in, there was
such an air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks desolate
when man has not yet laid his hand upon her breast; she is only lonely.
But when man has been, and has passed away, then she looks desolate.
"Well, I passed into the kraal, and went up to the principal hut. In front

of the hut was something with an old sheep-skin /kaross/ thrown over it.
I stooped down and drew off the rug, and then shrank back amazed, for
under it