Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Sue Asscher

Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland
by
Olive Schreiner
Author of "Dreams," "Dream Life and Real Life," "The Story of an

African Farm," etc.
Colonial Edition
(A photographic plate at the front of the book shows three people
hanging from a tree by their necks. Around them stand eight men,
looking not at all troubled by their participation in the scene. Of this
event all the survivors appear to be white, the victims black. The plate
is titled "From a Photograph taken in Matabeleland." S.A.)
To a Great Good Man, Sir George Grey,
Once Governor of the Cape Colony, who, during his rule in South
Africa, bound to himself the Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives he
governed, by an uncorruptible justice and a broad humanity; and who is
remembered among us today as representing the noblest attributes of an
Imperial Rule.
"Our low life was the level's and the night's; He's for the morning."
Olive Schreiner.
19, Russell Road, Kensington, W., February, 1897.
Aardvark - The great anteater.
Cape Smoke - A very inferior brandy made in Cape Colony.
Kopje - Little hillock.
Kraal - A Kaffir encampment.
Mealies - Maize (corn).
Riem - A thong of undressed leather universally used in South Africa.
Vatje of Old Dop - A little cask of Cape brandy.
Veld - Open Country.

Chapter I.
It was a dark night; a chill breath was coming from the east; not enough
to disturb the blaze of Trooper Peter Halket's fire, yet enough to make it
quiver. He sat alone beside it on the top of a kopje.
All about was an impenetrable darkness; not a star was visible in the
black curve over his head.
He had been travelling with a dozen men who were taking provisions
of mealies and rice to the next camp. He had been sent out to act as
scout along a low range of hills, and had lost his way. Since eight in the
morning he had wandered among long grasses, and ironstone kopjes,
and stunted bush, and had come upon no sign of human habitation, but
the remains of a burnt kraal, and a down-trampled and now
uncultivated mealie field, where a month before the Chartered
Company's forces had destroyed a native settlement.
Three times in the day it had appeared to him that he had returned to
the very spot from which he had started; nor was it his wish to travel
very far, for he knew his comrades would come back to look for him, to
the neighbourhood where he had last been seen, when it was found at
the evening camping ground that he did not appear.
Trooper Peter Halket was very weary. He had eaten nothing all day;
and had touched little of the contents of a small flask of Cape brandy he
carried in his breast pocket, not knowing when it would again be
replenished.
As night drew near he determined to make his resting place on the top
of one of the kopjes, which stood somewhat alone and apart from the
others. He could not easily be approached there, without his knowing it.
He had not much fear of the natives; their kraals had been destroyed
and their granaries burnt for thirty miles round, and they themselves
had fled: but he feared, somewhat, the lions, which he had never seen,
but of which he had heard, and which might be cowering in the long
grasses and brushwood at the kopje's foot:--and he feared, vaguely, he
hardly knew what, when he looked forward to his first long night alone

in the veld.
By the time the sun had set he had gathered a little pile of stumps and
branches on the top of the kopje. He intended to keep a fire burning all
night; and as the darkness began to settle down he