"Ah! Thank you," cried Amber Eyes, and looked over the other woman's shoulder to where Bettington stood with mouth open and eyes starting in his head. "My sister's baby is very well. I had such excellent help with her on the way down."

"Good! Mrs Stannard was rather anxious as to how you would manage.

Stan is getting along fine, and they hope to join you and Aimee in Durban much sooner than they expected. Hullo, Bet! What _you_ doing here?"

Bettington came forward and made such genuflections as were expected of him. His eyes had resumed their normal position, and his mouth was now trimmed with a sarcastic smile. But it is fair to say that the sarcasm was at his own expense. When Mrs Paulton had gone in and left them alone, he said gravely:

"I hope it gave you great pleasure to make a fool of me?"

"To do one's duty should always be pleasant," she responded with a ghost of a smile in her eye.

"Do you think you played quite fair?"

"Do you think _you_ did? Because I look like my sister, and borrow her Panama, and wear her bangle, are those any reasons why you should take me for a married woman--and a disloyal one at that?"

Bettington had to take his medicine like a man. The best he could do was to mutter with a pious eye that he "thanked G.o.d she was not."

"I thank G.o.d too," she said inflexibly. But a little later she added more kindly:

"Perhaps we both rather meanly took advantage of private information."

"I don't know what inexpiable things you could have heard about me?" he asked reproachfully, secure in a sense of self-righteousness.

"When I persuaded my sister to let me go at the last moment instead of herself, Mr Randal gave me a brief resume of your character and career.

No doubt he thought it might interest me to know something of the man whose waggon I was to share."

Ah! He almost wished he had time to go back to Umtali for a few days.

Yet he really could not feel very mad with Randal or anyone else. Life looked so beguilingly fair all at once. His heart was light as a cork, but he pitched his voice to a becomingly humble key.

"Don't you think we might begin again from quite a new basis?" he asked, looking at her with all the arrogance gone out of his eyes. "Without remembering any secret information or old scores?"

She considered a little while with downcast eyes, and a faint flush in her cheek. At last: "All right," she said softly. Then added reflectively: "Aimee will want a lot of looking after on the voyage."

But Bettington's spirit was not quite broken.

"No!" he said clearly and firmly, "I bar Aimee."

"She _is_ rather a little reptile," said Aimee's aunt.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

PROGRESS.

Old Nick Retief sat on his stoep gazing at the six thousand morgen of naked veld that const.i.tuted his share of the world, and there was trouble in his eagle-like gaze. He had the peculiar Boer eye, a vague light-blue feature sheathed with puckered skin, capable of seeing a tremendous distance, and apparently always searching for sheep in some far-off bush.

His undulating acres were composed for the most part of pasturage and poor pasturage at that. The rocky soil just escaped being "sour veld,"

but was grey with rhenoster bush and dotted by countless yellow patches of stink-boschie. Sugar-bush too, that signal of unfertile land was more plentiful than propitious. Only about one hundred morgen were sufficiently rich to produce forage for the beasts, and there were no fruit lands except for an orchard of ancient apricot trees, and a little orange grove that nestled in a sheltered kloof near the river.

A poor enough place from the point of view of the wealthy Paarl or Worcester-district farmers with their vineyards of rich black soil and river pasturage. But to Nick Retief it had no parallel among the beauty spots of the earth.

On the sun-baked, wind-swept farm, bare of trees except for a line of blue gums before the house, a few cl.u.s.ters of pomegranate, and an old _kameeldorn_ down by the goat kraal--the big blonde old Boer had been bred and reared, and in turn had bred and reared his family. After his brooding inarticulate fashion, he loved its bareness and bleakness, the wide loneliness of it, and above all the deep silences that from day to day were unbroken save by the purling of the river, the voices of his "boys" busy at their tasks, or the lowing of homing cattle.

He had never seen the sea, this old Boer of the back-veld, though (as the crow flew) it broke against the coast not more than eighty miles away. The purple mountains had no call for him, nor the busy town any lure like the lure of this unsheltered, whitewashed homestead on the flat-lands. In him still brooded something of the spirit of the old Voor-trekkers who trekked for the love of getting away from their fellow-men, and pitched their homes on the open plain with water at their backs and a vast emptiness before them; and to those who broke uninvited upon the silences or intruded on the empty plain, woe betided!

That was the trouble with old Nick Retief. Someone was threatening to intrude on his land and break the spell of its silent loneliness. But it was not an enemy whom he could pot at from behind his laagered waggons, nor a dozen enemies. It was the Government of his country, bent on the business of laying down steel rails that would enable locomotive-engines to tear screaming and belching, back and forth between the Transvaal and the Cape. And ever since he had got the news of it, Nick had cursed the "_slegte_ Government of red necks" on his rising up and at his lying down, and always his slow-moving brain pondered heavily on how he could outwit it and prevent the abominable outrage.

He did not approve of trains, and considered it his duty as a good Boer to resist such inventions of the Devil to the last ditch. He would give them a good fight if they were looking for it, those _slegte skepsels_!

It was his land not theirs, and right was on his side. He would prove that to them, and win out in the fight, even if it took everyone of the thousand golden sovereigns covered over with loose bran and hidden in a paraffin tin under his wife's bed. Never should they have his permission to come digging and blasting within a few hundred yards of his stoep! The thought was enough to make his wife, old Tanta Christina, turn in her grave over there by the _klompje_ of pomegranates, and bring the two tall sons who rested beside her forth to join in the fray with the _verdommeder_ etceteras.

The first intimation he had received of the evil business was an official letter informing him that the Government had decided that the railway must pa.s.s through his land, and requiring him to appoint a valuer to meet and agree with the official valuer as to compensation.

To this old Nick had written, or caused to be written--for he was one of those old-time Boers whose literary accomplishments went no further than the ability to sign his name with a laboured flourish--an infuriated reply, rejecting the Government, its valuers, and all that pertained unto the scheme. A second letter from Cape Town decorated with many red seals, contained an official proposal to buy the property known as "Jackalsfontein," and an inquiry as to what price its owner set upon said property. The reply to this was brief to rudeness. The farm was not in the market and its owner was not selling at any price.

To-day had come the third letter, a frigid doc.u.ment, firm and arrogant as only Governments secure in unlimited power dare be--and the burden of it was that whether the owner of Jackalsfontein liked it or not the Government was going to run a railway across his land. The survey work would proceed, and if Mr Retief objected he was at liberty to seek redress in the courts of his country. It was over this letter that the old man sat brooding in the morning sunshine, eyes on the distant sheep, one gnarled, k.n.o.bbly hand lying clenched on the arm of his chair, the other hanging straight down almost touching the ground, thumb in the bowl of his pipe. His immense bulk of brawn and fat was clothed in garments cut and sewn by the fingers long since peacefully at rest beneath the pomegranates. The trousers were as two enormous drain pipes that hung suspended from above his middle in the straight lines abhorred of Nature; circling round his generous waist they sprayed out in a wide V over his stomach where the two top b.u.t.tons failed to collaborate with the b.u.t.tonholes. His short but roomy coat could easily have accommodated a second man of his size, and over his cotton shirt he wore instead of waistcoat his flowing beard--a tangled grey-brown affair tousled by many a south easter, and somewhat recalling certain lines of Edward Lear's:

"It is as I feared, Two c.o.c.ks and a hen, one owl and a wren, Have all made their home in my beard!"

On his feet were home-made veld-schoens of raw-hide, "breyed" to the softness of suede with toes cut square as the nose of a punt.

From within the house could be heard at intervals a little s.n.a.t.c.h of song, like the chirp of a cheerful bird flying from bough to bough. At last in the doorway appeared Chrissie Retief, daughter and only remaining child of the family, a blithe good-looking girl between eighteen and twenty years of age. She addressed her father in the _taal_ speaking reproachfully:

"Ach! Sis, Pa! you still fretting there over that old Government letter?"

He turned his vague ruminating eyes on her.

"The dogs shall never bring their stink-machines across my land."

"What can _you_ do then, my poor Poppa? They _will_ bring them here, and you can't do anything. You can't shoot them with a gun, or throw them with a stone."

"I will fight them with the law--if it takes my last pound," muttered Nick.

"What's the good? They will win in the end, Governments always do,"

said Chrissie who had been to school at Paarl, and knew a few things.

"We'll see. I'll go to Piquetberg to-morrow and talk to old Frickie de Villiers. He's a _slim kerel_, and ought to be able to _vernuck_ them if anyone can. What is the use of my tin full of money if I can't get the better of the dogs?"

"Ach toch! What's the good of fretting your blood then, Pa? Let them make their old railway. We shall see something then, but."

"_Allemagtage_! Are you a child of mine?" the old man roared. His vague eyes were suddenly fierce and full of fire. But Chrissie was not of the kidney to be intimidated even by her father. She turned away with a trill of laughter, finger on lip, to listen to a bird that had just perched on a branch of the kameeldorn and was calling out in three high insistent notes:

"Bock-bock-mackeerie! Bock-bock-mackeerie!"

It was the South African whip-poor-will whose cry heralds the arrival of strangers.

"The bock-mackeerie!" cried Chrissie ecstatically.

She was young enough to be keen for excitement in any shape or form and would not have objected to making coffee ten times a day for pa.s.sing strangers. Anything that broke the monotony of life at Jackalsfontein was welcome to her. She put her hand across her eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, and looked into the distance, hoping for the sight of an approaching Cape cart. The roundness of her upraised arm strained the seams of her cotton sleeve, and a pretty curve from bust to waist and waist to heel was visible if there had been any eye to admire it. Her print dress was badly cut and the pattern faded from much banging on river stones. But there is nothing so difficult to hide as a good figure. Chrissie had got hers from riding astride, bareback, on young fillies and calves, and swimming in the river. The physical-culture mistress at Paarl had put a finishing touch by teaching her the value of poise and controlled muscles. Small wonder that the solitude of Jackalsfontein did not appeal to her as much as to her father. She was still in the romping, young-animal stage when she needed other young creatures to romp with. It was a dull life for the girl.

"I see something, Pa! There is something coming," she cried suddenly, and gave a skip of excitement.