Part 2 (2/2)
Smoots Beste growled in his throat:
”He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay, that is all. There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that--and where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?”
Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the Englishman had gone to h.e.l.l.
Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and pushed it across the counter.
”You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to me.”
Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone less surly:
”I am listening, Baas.”
Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more simple and candid than usual:
”This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and Winchester repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has died in my debt for the room and the nursing, and the good nourishment, for which I trusted him all these three weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own pocket.
Rotten soft have I behaved over him, that's the G.o.d's truth, and when I shall get back my own there's no knowing. But, of course, I shall act square.”
The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, greenish-yellow teeth. He scratched his s.h.a.ggy head, and said, his tongue lubricated to incautiousness by the potent liquor:
”The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, and the stores in the second waggon are worth good money. And the woman that is dead had jewels--I have seen them on her--diamonds and rubies in rings and bracelets fit for the vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did not bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built with his two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon.”
”Did he not?” asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full in the face with a pleasant smile. ”Are they not?”
Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said in a much more docile tone:
”What do you want me to do?”
Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially:
”Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one of the waggons up to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me to the Civil Commissioner. I will tell him how the man is dead, and he will send down a magistrate's clerk to put a seal on the boxes and cases, and then he will go through the letters and papers in the pocket-book, and write to the people of the dead man over in England, supposing he has any, for I have heard him tell my wife there was not a living soul of his name now, except the child----”
”But what good will all this do you and me, Baas?” asked the Boer subserviently.
Bough spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
”Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted up the man's family, there will be an order to sell the waggons and oxen and other property to pay the expenses of his burying, and the child's keep here and pa.s.sage from Cape Town, if she is to be sent to England ... and what is left over, see you, after the law expenses have been paid, will go to the settlement of our just claims. They will never let honest men suffer for behaving square, sure no, they'll not do that!”
But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair dealing of the lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt.
”Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers are duyvels as well as rogues,” said Smoots Beste, with a dull flash of originality.
Bough nodded, and pushed another gla.s.s of liquor across the bar.
”And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with one or two of 'em. By gum! I call myself lucky to be in this with a square man like you. There's the waggon, brand-new--you know what it cost at Cape Town--and the team, I trust you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to hinder a man who hasn't the fear of the Lord in him from heading north-east instead of north-west, selling the waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad or Schoenbroon, and living on a snug farm of your own for the rest of your life under another man's name, where the English magistrates and the police will never find you, though their noses were keener than the wild dogs?”
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