And a bend in the road brought into view other horsemen--other
"habits"--stationary, and obviously and provokingly awaiting the arrival
of the two laggards.

And the equestrians, now merged into one group, rode on their way in the
golden sunlight of that lovely afternoon, rejoicing in the exquisite
glories of the wild and romantic mountain road. But, in the prevailing
mirth, one among them bore no part, for he carried within his breast the
dead burden of a sore and aching heart.

CHAPTER ONE.

THIRST-LAND.

The heat was terrible.

Terrible, even for the parched, burning steppes of the High Veldt, whose
baked and crumbling surface lay gasping in cracks and fissures beneath
the blazing fierceness of the African sun. Terrible for the stock,
enfeebled and emaciated after months of bare subsistence on such
miserable wiry blades of shrivelled grass as it could manage to pick up,
and on the burnt and withered Karroo bushes. Doubly terrible for those
to whom the wretched animals, all skin and bone, and dying off like
flies, represented nothing more nor less than the means of livelihood
itself.

Far away to the sky-line on every side, far as the eye could travel,
stretched the dead, weary surface of the plain. Not a tree, not a bush
to break the level. On the one hand a low range of flat-topped hills
floated, mirage like, in mid-air, so distant that a day's journey would
hardly seem to bring you any nearer; on the other, nothing--nothing but
plain and sky, nothing but the hard red earth, shimmering like a furnace
in the intolerable afternoon heat; nothing but a frightful desert,
wherein, apparently, no human being could live--not even the ape-like
Bushman or the wild Koranna. Yet, there stands a house.

A house thoroughly in keeping with its surroundings. A low one-storied
building, with a thatched roof and walls of sun-baked brick. Just a
plain parallelogram; no attempt at ornamentation, no verandah, not even
a _stoep_. No trace of a garden either, for in this horrible desert of
drought and aridity nothing will grow. Hard by stand the square stone
kraals for the stock, and a little further on, where the level of the
plain sinks into a slight depression, is an artificial dam, its liquid
store at present reduced to a small patch of red and turgid water lying
in the middle of a surrounding margin of dry flaky mud, baked into a
criss-cross pattern of cracks, like a huge mosaic.

On a low, stony _kopje_, a