"You are taking cartridges to the Magatese Kafirs." "Suppose I am, how are you going to stop me?"

"Ach, Mr Hartley, you think because I am an Afrikander that I am not slim. I have told my friends, those who are letting me have the wheel, and if I am not back with them to-morrow to tell them all is right they are coming to catch you. You cannot get away, so you must give me what I want."

"What do you want?" Hartley asked, after a successful struggle to resist his natural impulse to knock the old man down.

"It is this, Mr Hartley, I know you are going to get diamonds for these cartridges." "How do you know that?" "Did you not tell Clarie and Coos Piet that you are after diamonds, and do I not know that there are no diamonds north of the Vaal River, just as there is no gold south of it?

And do I not know that these Kafir chiefs have many? You see, I have thought this thing out very hard and strong, Mr Hartley."

"Well, come to business; what do you want to make it right with your friends?"

"Mr Hartley, you know I want money that I may do no more transport riding and marry Clarie.”

"How much?"

"I want £500, and you must promise to make Clarie want to marry me."

Hartley laughed.

"You must be a fool, Johannes, or you would know that no man can make a woman change her mind when it is a matter of liking or disliking."

Ach, but you are slim with women. She will do what you tell her."

Hartley lit up his pipe and bungled it.

"Look here, Johannes, I'll make a bargain with you. You say you want money to marry Clarie.

I can give you that, but I cannot give you the woman if she refuses, but, as you say, I have good ways with her. Now, Clarie does not like you, but you can do much to alter that?"

"How? Tell me how, Mr Hartley?" the old man asked eagerly.

"You must take your Bible oath that you will make it right with your friends and help me through; then I will give you £500, and tell Clarie that you are truly an oprecht Burgher, because you keep your word and do not lead the blind into a pitfall."

“And will you say to her that she must marry me?" "I will tell her she must do so if she can like you, and you can help her to do that by doing what I say."

"Mr Hartley, I will take my Bible oath to anything you wish."

"That's all right, Johannes. Now about your friends. How much do they want?"

"Nothing.

I said nothing to them, for I did not know about the cartridges till my Kafirs told me when I came back yesterday. Ach, Mr Hartley, but I am slim," and the old man leant against the waggon and laughed a shrill falsetto.

Hartley never goes back on his word? Do you take me for a Boer verneuker? No wonder you thought I had sold you at Pretoria. I tell you I shall keep every part of my agreement. I shall pay him his five hundred, and out of my share, mind you."

Wilmot became profusely apologetic and penitent, but Hartley was long in being soothed. He had been badly hurt on his most sensitive point, and declined all explanation. He called up Smeer. "Johannes, do you think I mean what I have said to you?" he demanded.

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66

"I have no friends, man. Van Enter told me where I should find an old waggon left in a marsh about eight hours from here, and I found it; and I am going to take my boys and bring the wheel away," and he laughed long and loudly.

"So you have verneuked me?"

Smeer could not speak. He simply nodded assent, and continued to let out his piercing staccato shrieks.

"With all his cunning he has overreached himself," was Wilmot's remark when Hartley told him the story. "How?"

"He has no security." Next moment he regretted his speech. Hartley turned on him furiously.

"No security! Damn you, is that still your idea of me? Don't you know that Dick

ting beside him, gave him an account of the trip to the kraal.

"It's all right," said he. "Mpfeu is drinking heavily, but his induna, Bulalie, is keeping a strong hand over affairs of state, and will see us through."

"Did you see the diamonds?" Wilmot inquired eagerly.

Hartley looked hard at him. "Man, but you are a doubting Thomas! Yes, I saw the diamonds, though I didn't ask to. What is more, I have selected those I want, and I reckon there are twenty thousand pounds' worth, or I am no judge of stones."

"I suppose there is no fear of the old savage going back on his bargain -refusing to pay when he has got the Wilmot put the ques

gun?"

tion hesitatingly.

"Do you think I should

have taken all this risk and trouble on an off-chance? No, sir, you may believe it or not, but I would rather take the bare word of a raw Kafir in a business like this than the sworn declaration of any white man I know." Hartley an

swered with a fierceness that completely decided Wilmot that he would not again give expression to any doubts he might have. He watched with mingled admiration and astonishment the bold and unhesitating manner in which Hartley displayed to the induna the evidence of the keeping of his part of the bargain.

Smeer took the three Kafirs for the wheel early next morning, and returned with it before noon the following day. The journey was resumed that evening by the light of the moon, and for the first time for a week Wilmot slept peacefully.

AT the turn of the road I swung round in my saddle and waved a hand to the justices of the peace. They waved back, and one of them shouted something. They appeared as a painting made up of broadbrimmed hats, beards, and flourished arms, shut in a framework whose one side was the bark wall of the bush pub: the top of the frame was the bark roof of the verandah, while the other side was a gnarled verandah - post,

the

whole picture softly shrouded in tobacco-smoke and the deepening twilight. Good fellows, all in the prime of life then, they are well on the downhill track by now. As I write this I wave my hand to them again across the years. They had perhaps stretched their consciences somewhat to send happily on his road a youngster who had taken their thoughts back to England for a couple of hours; but I knew that their justice would have been evenhanded and English enough in any cause that mattered at all.

I was riding a horse borrowed from a cattle station that lay about half-way between the court-house and the sheep-camp. Roughly, I had fifty miles to ride to get to this place, and I had brought no food with me; for I had started away in a too great jubilation at my success in court, mixed with an overwhelming sense of rushing, in a somewhat hero

VOL. CLXXVIII.-NO. MLXXVII.

like pose perhaps, upon the duty still to be done. I was riding alone through the illimitable bush, that only a tick or two backwards of eternity's clock had never known a booted tread nor an iron-shod hoof-track. Conjuring to myself the sensation that I was the first man to plunge into the heart of this fickle continent, it did not take long, you may be sure, until I was being followed by mighty herds of cattle all my own; great tracts of the land were mine; by the side of a deep mirageous lagoon there sprang up a deep mirageous homestead, creeper-covered, and, yes, though I knew she would never leave England for this rough life, though for aught I knew she was wife and mother now,-I had taken all these great possessions, I would take her too, and I pictured her mirageously there on the deep verandah, looking out, waiting for me. .. My horse stumbled badly, and the mirage melted from me and flew to its home among the dreams, where it will live always, for dreams are deathless.

It was almost dark: as I pulled my horse to his feet again I peered down at the track. I knew at once, but would not believe; so getting quickly to the ground, I made quite certain, and while doing so came into possession of much the same feeling that a man must have who bobs up and

F

down in mid-ocean and sees the stern-lights of his steamer growing steadily smaller. I was off the road and travelling on a small bridle-track, with no knowledge as to how long I had been doing so.

With subsequent years of experience my bump of locality never arrived at any great dimensions: at that time it must have been no bump, but a depression. I dragged my horse round to examine the track behind him, dragged him back again to look at it in front; then, lest the road should be on one side or the other and close by, I led him first to one side and then to the other. Suddenly my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach, and I felt as if the only friend left to me on earth had been stricken dead at my side, for it came to me as such a blow that I had turned round so often that, fool that I was, I didn't even know from which direction I had come along the bridle-track. In a foolish panic I threw myself into the saddle and plunged off into the night, swept along by the lost feeling in all its first sharp uncomprehending agony: to be still, to think, to reason, was for the time impossible. Presently I got down again. The little bridle track with its last slender thread of hope that I was running it the right way had slipped from under me in the darkness. I remembered that a little way back my horse had shied to the left: I dragged him to the right, peering at the ground, farther on, and peered again, still a little farther.

I was

There was no track. utterly and hopelessly lost in the bush-bushed, as the bushman calls it.

I knew that there were men who rode at night guiding themselves by the stars: for me, even if I had known how to pick my stars and keep to them, I had no idea under what particular constellation lay the station I was making for. I knew that there were men who rode by instinct,-men who, as the phrase goes, "you could not bush," for having once been to a place, they could, if need were, go to it again through black darkness years afterwards from an utterly different point of the compass. I would have bartered away whole kingdoms that night for one spark of this instinct whereby to light a candle in my brain that would guide me back to the lost road.

I pulled myself together, sat down upon a log, filled my pipe, and lit it. With my first reasoning moment came the sting of the tardy knowledge that had I done this when I first found myself wrong I should in all probability have been right again a few minutes afterwards. I remembered one of the old shepherds saying it: "Soon as ever yer know yer don't know, pull out yer pipe and 'ave a draw." My smoke only rammed home the completeness of my impotence. I might start off at any degree of a circle drawn around my feet, then, even if I could keep straight, it was 359 chances to one that I went in the wrong direction, which of course was an exaggeration; but at the