Part 17 (1/2)
With it the man with the gun has deemed it sound policy not to interfere. To encourage the dogs would render them too eager--at the expense of their judgment--and to fire a second shot would be seriously to imperil them. Besides, he is interested in this not so very ill-matched combat. Now, however, it is time to call them off.
To call is one thing, but to be obeyed is quite another. The two great dogs, excited and savage, are snarling and worrying at the carcase of their now vanquished enemy--and the first attempt to enforce the order is met with a very menacing and determined growl, for this man is not their master. Wisely he desists.
”Confound it, they'll tear that fine skin to ribbons!” he soliloquises disgustedly. Then--”Oh, there you are, Bayfield. Man, call those brutes off. They don't care a d.a.m.n for me.”
A horseman has dashed into the glade. He, too, carries a gun, but in a trice he has torn a _reim_ from the D. of his saddle, and is las.h.i.+ng and cursing with a will among the excited hounds. These draw off, still snarling savagely, for he is their master.
”_Magtig_! Blachland, but you're in luck's way!” he exclaimed. ”That's the finest ram that's been shot here for the last five years. Well done! I believe it's the same one I drove right over that Britisher last month, and he missed it clean with both barrels. That young fellow stopping with Earle.”
”Who's he? A jackaroo?”
”No. A visitor. I don't know who he is. By the way, I must take you over to Earle's one of these days. He's got a good bit of shoot. Look here, Jafta,” turning to a yellow-skinned Hottentot, also mounted, who had just arrived on the scene, ”Baas Blachland has shot our biggest bushbuck ram at last.”
”Ja. That is true, Baas,” grinned the fellow, who was Bayfield's after-rider, inspecting the edge of his knife preparatory to the necessary disembowelling and loading up of the quarry.
”We may as well be getting along,” said Bayfield. ”Jafta, go and fetch Baas Blachland's horse.”
”I thought an up-country man like you would turn up his nose at our hunting, Blachland,” said Bayfield as they rode along. ”But what you can't turn up your nose at is our air--eh? Why, you're looking twice the man you were a fortnight ago even. I suppose that infernal fever's not easily shaken off.”
”It's the very devil to shake off, but if anything will do it, this will.” And the speaker glanced around with a feeling of complete and restful enjoyment.
The kloof they were threading afforded in itself a n.o.ble and romantic scene. Great krantzes soaring up to the unclouded blue, walls of red ironstone gleaming like bronze in the sun-rays--or, in tier upon tier, peeping forth from festoons of creeper and anch.o.r.ed tree and spiky aloe.
Yonder a sweep of spur on the one hand, like a combing wave of tossing tumbling foliage, on the other a mighty cliff, forming a portal beyond which was glimpsed a round, rolling summit, high above in the distance-- but everywhere foliage, its many shades of green relieved here and there by the scarlet and pink of the wild geranium, the light blue of the plumbago, and half a dozen other splashes of colour, bright and harmonising; aglow, too, with the glancing of brilliant-winged birds, tuneful with their melodious piping and the murmuring hum of bees. And the air--strong, clear, exhilarating, such as never could be mistaken for the enervating steaminess of up-country heat--for the place was at a good elevation, and in one of the settled parts of the Cape Colony.
Gazing around upon all this, Hilary Blachland seemed to be drinking in new draughts of life. The bout of fever, in the throes of which we last saw him lying, helpless and alone, had proved to be an exceptionally sharp one; indeed, but for the accident of Sybrandt happening along almost immediately after the Matabele raid, the tidings of which had reached England, as we have seen--it is probable that a fatal termination might have ensued. But Sybrandt had tended him with devoted and loyal _camaraderie_, and when sufficiently restored, he had decided to sell off everything and clear out. ”You'll come back again, Blachland,” Sybrandt had said. ”Mark my words, you'll come back again.
We all do.” And he had answered that perhaps he would, but not just yet awhile.
He had gone down country to the seaside, but the heat at Durban was so great at the time of year as to counteract the beneficial effect of the sea air. Then he had bethought himself of George Bayfield, a man he had known previously and liked, and who had more than once pressed him to pay him a visit at his farm in the Eastern Province. And now, here he was.
A great feeling of restfulness and self-gratulation was upon him. He was free once more, free for a fresh clean start. The sequence of his foolishness, which had hung around his neck like a millstone, for years, had been removed, had suddenly fallen off like a load. For he had come to see things clearer now. His character had changed and hardened during that interval, and he had come to realise that hitherto, his views of life, and his way of treating its conditions, had been very much those of a fool.
George Bayfield had received him with a very warm welcome. He was a colonial man, and had never been out of his native land, yet contrasting them as they stood together it was Blachland who looked the harder and more weather-beaten of the two, so thorough an acclimatising process had his up-country wanderings proved. Bayfield was a man just the wrong side of fifty, and a widower. Two of his boys were away from home, and at that time his household consisted of a small son of eleven, and a daughter--of whom more anon.
The kloof opened out into a wide open valley, covered mainly with rhenoster brush and a sprinkling of larger shrubs in clumps. From this valley on either side, opened lateral kloofs, similar to the one from which they had just emerged, kloofs dark with forest and tangled thickets, very nurseries for tiger and wild-dogs, Bayfield declared--but they had the compensating element of affording good sport whenever he wanted to go out and shoot a bushbuck or two--as in the present case.
His boundary lines ran right along the high _rand_ which shut in the broad valley on either side, and the farm was an excellent one for sheep and ostriches. In fact the valley portion of it was a perfect network of wire fencing, and in their respective ”camps” the great black bipeds stalked to and fro, uttering their truculent boom, or lazily picking at the aromatic gra.s.ses, which const.i.tuted their natural and aboriginal food. And the name of the place was Lannercost.
”These confounded ostriches spoil half the shooting on the place, and, for the matter of that, anywhere,” remarked Bayfield, as they ambled along through one of the large camps, where one exceptionally fierce bird hung about their flank, only kept from a nearer approach by the presence of the two dogs. ”You flush a covey of partridges or a big troop of guinea-fowl, and away they go and squat in complete security under the wing of some particularly 'kwai' bird in the next camp. It's beastly tantalising. Ever shot any wild ostriches up-country, Blachland?”
”Yes, on two occasions--and I enjoyed it for that very reason. I was held up once on top of a rail for nearly two hours besieged on each side by an infuriated tame one. Had to wait until dark to get down. So you see it was a kind of poetic justice to turn the tables on the wild ones.”
”Rather. These are good game preservers though, in that they keep the n.i.g.g.e.rs from killing the small bucks in the camps. Look at those few springbuck I'm trying to preserve. They'd all have been killed off if it wasn't for the 'kwai' birds in the camp. By George! the sun'll be down before we get home. That isn't good for a man with fever still in his system at this time of year.”
”Oh, that's no matter. I'm a good deal too tough.”
”Don't you be so sure about that. We'd better push the nags on a bit.”
The house stood at the head of the valley, and had been growing larger and larger as they drew near. The sun was dropping, and that wondrously beautiful glow which heralds his departure from the vivid, clear South African day was upon the surroundings, softening, toning everything.
Hundreds of doves cooed melodiously from the sprays, and as they pa.s.sed through a gateway, ascending a winding path between high quince hedges, clouds of twittering finks and long-tailed mouse-birds scattered with a whirr on either side of the way. Spreuws, too, whistling among the tall fig-trees in the orchard, helped to swell the chorus of Nature's evensong.