ed, and send him
on the trek again. Meanwhile the oxen were hired out to work for a farmer
fifty miles away. That was called sending them to graze and gain strength
for more work; and there was the keep of two Cape boys, and the Kaffir and
the Boer driver, and the cost of nursing and sick man's diet, and the care
of the child. A heavy bill of charges was mounting up against the English
traveller. Much of what the belt contained would honestly be Bough's.

There was no doctor and no medicine save the few drugs the sick man had
carried, as all travellers do. The milk for which he asked for himself and
the child, which was procured from the native cattle-kraals for a tikkie a
pint, and for which Bough charged at the price of champagne, kept him
alive. Broth or eggs he sickened at and turned from, and, indeed, the one
was greasy and salt, the others of appalling mustiness. He would regularly
swallow the tabloids of quinine or lithia, and fall back on the hard,
coarse pillow, exhausted by the mere effort of unscrewing the nickel-cap
of the little phial, and tell himself that he was getting stronger.
Sometimes he really was so, and then the child sat on his wide hollow
chest, and played with the beard that was now all grey and unkempt and
matted, until some word in her baby prattle, some look of wondering
inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed, like his own,
that were almost too beautiful to be a man's, people used to say, like the
weak, passionate, gentle mouth under the heavy moustache, would bring back
all the anguish of his loss, and waken anew that torturing voice that
accused him of being false to his compact with the dead. Then he would
call, and send the child away, borne in the arms of the Hottentot
chambermaid to breathe the fresh air upon the veld. And, left alone, he
would draw up the rough sheets over his head, with gaunt clutching
fingers, and weep, though sometimes no tears came to moisten his haggard,
staring eyes.

One night, while the flat gold hunting-watch ticked above his head in the
little embroidered chamois-leather pouch dead hands had worked, Knowledge
came to him with a sudden rigor of the muscles of the wasted body, and a
bursting forth from every pore of the dank, dark-hued sweat of coming
dissolution.

He was not ever going to get well, and fetch the clergyman to pray over
and bless her resting-place. He was going to die and lie beside her there,
under the red earth topped b