Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland | Page 9

I'd
a vatje of Old Dop as high as that- -," indicating with his hand an object
about two feet high, "and the other fellow wanted to buy it from me. I
knew two of that. I said I wanted it for myself. He offered me this, and
he offered me that. At last I said, 'Well, just to oblige you, I give you
the vatje and you give me the girl!' And so he did. Most people
wouldn't have fancied a nigger girl who'd had two nigger children, but I
didn't mind; it's all the same to me. And I tell you she worked. She

made a garden, and she and the other girl worked in it; I tell you I didn't
need to buy a sixpence of food for them in six months, and I used to
sell green mealies and pumpkins to all the fellows about. There weren't
many flies on her, I tell you. She picked up English quicker than I
picked up her lingo, and took to wearing a dress and shawl."
The stranger still sat motionless, looking into the fire.
Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. "Well, I
came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch
something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a
nigger man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a
word to a nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as
cool as can be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked
her to give him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn't
think anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging
about the camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and
asked me for a lot of cartridges. She'd never asked me for anything
before. I asked her what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and
she said the old nigger woman who helped carry in water to the garden
said she couldn't stay and help her any more unless she got some
cartridges to give her son who was going up north hunting elephants.
The woman got over me to give her the cartridges because she was
going to have a kid, and she said she couldn't do the watering without
help. So I gave them her. I never put two and two together.
"Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with
the Matabele, I thought I'd volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to
be got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought I'd
only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women there,
and a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I told them
not to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to keep an eye
on them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said the
Mashonas didn't love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out that they
loved them better than they loved us. They've got the damned
impertinence to say, that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but
the white man oppresses them all the time!

"Well, I left those women there," said Peter, dropping his hands on his
knees. "Mind you, I'd treated those women really well. I'd never given
either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all the
fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn't been gone a month,
when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had the
woman first--he's dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut
door with his throat cut--and what do you think he said to me? Why, I
hadn't been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all
the big one. What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball
and cartridge she could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and
even the lid off the tea-box to melt into bullets for the old
muzzle-loaders they have; and off she went, and took the young one too.
The fellow wrote me they didn't touch another thing: they left the
shawls and dresses I gave them kicking about the huts, and went off
naked with only their blankets and the ammunition on their heads. A
nigger man met them twenty miles off, and he said they were skooting
up for Lo Magundi's country as fast as they could go.
"And do you know," said Peter, striking his