om and exhilaration
in the very novelty of the surroundings.

"Well, this is awfully jolly!" pronounced Gerard, looking round.

"Eh! Think so, do you?" said John Dawes. "How would you like to be a
transport-rider yourself?"

"I believe I'd like nothing better," came the prompt reply. "It must be
the jolliest, healthiest life in the world."

"So?" said the other, with a dry chuckle. "Especially when it's been
raining for three days, and the road is one big mudhole, when your
waggon's stuck wheel-deep, and no sooner do you dig it out than in goes
another wheel. Why, I've been stuck that way, coming over the Berg"--
the speaker meant the Drakensberg--"and haven't made a dozen miles in a
fortnight. And cold, too! Why, for a week at a time I've not known
what it was to have a dry stitch on me, and the rain wouldn't allow you
to light a fire. Jolly healthy life that, eh?"

"Cold!" broke from both the listeners, in astonishment. "Is it ever
cold here?"

"Isn't it? You just wait till you get away from this steaming old
sponge of a coast belt. Why, you get snow on the Berg, yards deep.
I've known fellows lose three full spans of oxen at a time, through an
unexpected fall of snow. Well, that's one of the sides of
transport-riding. Another is when there hasn't been rain for months,
and the _veldt's_ as bare as the skull of a bald-headed man. Then you
may crawl along, choking with dust, mile after mile, day after day, the
road strewn like a paper-chase, with the bones of oxen which have
dropped in the yoke or been turned adrift to die, too weak to go any
further--and every water-hole you come to nothing but a beastly mess of
pea-soup mud, lucky even if there isn't a dead dog in the middle of it.
My word for it, you get sick of the endless blue of the sky and the
red-brown of the _veldt_, of the poor devils of oxen, staggering along
with their tongues out--walking skeletons--creeping their six miles a
day, and sometimes not that. You get sick of your own very life
itself."

"That's another side to the picture with a vengeance," said Harry.

"Rather. Don't you jump away with the idea that the life of a
transport-rider, or any other life in this blessed country, is all
plum-jam; because, if so, you'll tumble into the most lively kind of
mistake."

Thus chatting, they travelled on; and, at length, after the regulation
four hours' _trek_, by which time it was nearly midnight, Dawes gave
orders to outspan.