me. Now I go cook dinner."

Benita sat by the lake till the twilight fell, and the wild geese began
to flight over her. Then she walked back to the house thinking no more
of Heer Meyer, thinking only that she was weary of this place in which
there was nothing to occupy her mind and distract it from its ever
present sorrow.

At dinner, or rather supper, that night she noticed that both her father
and his partner seemed to be suffering from suppressed excitement, of
which she thought she could guess the cause.

"Did you find your messengers, Mr. Meyer?" she asked, when the men had
lit their pipes, and the square-face--as Hollands was called in those
days, from the shape of the bottle--was set upon the rough table of
speckled buchenhout wood.

"Yes, I found them," he answered; "they are in the kitchen now." And he
looked at Mr. Clifford.

"Benita, my dear," said her father, "rather a curious thing has
happened." Her face lit up, but he shook his head. "No, nothing to do
with the shipwreck--that is all finished. Still, something that may
interest you, if you care to hear a story."

Benita nodded; she was in a mood to hear anything that would occupy her
thoughts.

"You know something about this treasure business," went on her father.
"Well, this is the tale of it. Years ago, after you and your mother
had gone to England, I went on a big game shooting expedition into the
interior. My companion was an old fellow called Tom Jackson, a rolling
stone, and one of the best elephant hunters in Africa. We did pretty
well, but the end of it was that we separated north of the Transvaal, I
bringing down the ivory that we had shot, and traded, and Tom stopping
to put in another season, the arrangement being that he was to join me
afterwards, and take his share of the money. I came here and bought this
farm from a Boer who was tired of it--cheap enough, too, for I only gave
him L100 for the 6,000 acres. The kitchens behind were his old house,
for I built a new one.

"A year had gone by before I saw any more of Tom Jackson, and then he
turned up more dead than alive. He had been injured by an elephant, and
lay for some months among the Makalanga to the north of Matabeleland,
where he got fever badly at a place called Bambatse, on the Zambesi.
These Makalanga are a strange folk. I believe their name means the
People of the Sun; at any rate, they are the last of some ancient
race. Well, while he was there he cured the old Molimo, o