managed a joint at
Johannesburg, and it grew upon him--the need of the soothing, supporting
deadener. He went along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling
the ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.

He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It moved and whimpered.
He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue
phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the
Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and
a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they
were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They
earned pay and rations. They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and
west sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches--often under
fire--and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought in fresh meat. But
their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered horribly.
They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and
fought with the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat-tins and
licked them. They stalked about the town and the native stad like living
skeletons. They dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging
for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how
things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads of horses and
mules were boiled down into soup, and they were fed. But a time was to
come when even that soup was wanted to keep the life in white people. You
saw the famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to
refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine, under the
blue, blue February sky, because white people had got to keep on living.

The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death had come upon
her in the midst of the teeming life of the jungle, and she had fallen
down there in her ragged red blanket among the tree-roots that arched and
knotted over the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They
stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she heard the
steps of a shod person the last spark of life glimmered feebly up in her.
Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet remained. She smelled a white
man, and her cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound
made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the
same in Dutch and English:

"Water!"

Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite ex