ange in him than the same number of
years spent under ordinary conditions would have done. They have, in
fact, made a man of him. His frame has broadened and his muscles are
set. There is a firm, self-reliant look in his face, now bronzed to the
hue of that of John Dawes himself, and he has grown a beard. In short,
any one who saw him now would pronounce him to have become a remarkably
fine-looking fellow.

By no means all fun has Gerard found that up-country trading trip. Of
toil--hard, prosaic, wearying--plenty has come his way. There have been
times, for instance, when every muscle has been strained and aching with
the labour of digging out the waggons, stuck fast over axle-deep in a
mud hole--digging them out only to see them plunge in again deeper than
ever; or again in offloading everything, and carrying the whole cargo
piecemeal up some short but rugged acclivity impossible to avoid, and up
which the great vehicles could only be drawn empty. Half fainting
beneath the burning glare of a well-nigh tropical sun--toiling amid the
sheeting downpour of days of rain, and that too often on a ration of
mealies or hard biscuit, and a little brack or muddy water--he has never
yet dreamed of shirking, never complained.

That trek, too, of nearly forty-eight hours over a parched land, where
each expected water-hole was a mere surface of cracked and baked mud,
and the oxen with hanging tongues and saliva-dropping jaws could hardly
pull half a mile per hour, and the night was as brassy as the day, and
their wanderings and divergences far and wide in search of the necessary
fluid was rewarded with greater exhaustion than ever, and the red
surface of the burning _veldt_ stretched grim and forbidding to the
sky-line, mocking them now and again with a fair mirage--that terrible
time when they sat together on the waggon in silence and wondering what
the end would be, or rather when it would be, then, too, no word of
complaint had escaped Gerard.

Of dangers too he has borne his share. He can recall the horde of
turbulent and aggressive natives crowding round the waggon of which he
was in sole charge, when during a whole day his life and the lives of
the two "boys" seemed to hang upon a hair,--nights spent in lonely
watches, in an insecure and semi-hostile land, expecting the spears of
predatory savages in the treacherous darkness. That other night, too,
when he was lost in the _veldt_ and had to lie out in the open, with