The Project Gutenberg eBook, Blue Aloes, by Cynthia Stockley

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Title: Blue Aloes
Stories of South Africa

Author: Cynthia Stockley

Release Date: September 10, 2007 [eBook #22568]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLUE ALOES***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

BLUE ALOES

Stories Of South Africa

by

CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

Author of "Poppy," "Wild Honey," etc.

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London

The Knickerbocker Press
1919

Copyright, 1919
by
Cynthia Stockley

CONTENTS

BLUE ALOES

THE LEOPARD

ROSANNE OZANNE

APRIL FOLLY

Blue Aloes

The Strange Story of a Karoo Farm

PART I

Night, with the sinister, brooding peace of the desert, enwrapped the
land, and the inmates of the old Karoo farm had long been at rest; but
it was an hour when strange tree-creatures cry with the voices of human
beings, and stealthy velvet-footed things prowl through places
forbidden by day, and not all who rested at Blue Aloes were sleeping.

Christine Chaine, wakeful and nervous, listening to the night sounds,
found them far more distracting than any the day could produce. Above
the breathing of the three children sleeping near her in the big room,
the buzz of a moth-beetle against the ceiling, and the far-off howling
of jackals, she could hear something out in the garden sighing with
faint, whistling sighs. More disquieting still was a gentle,
intermittent tapping on the closed and heavily barred shutters, inside
which the windows stood open, inviting coolness. She had heard that
tapping every one of the three nights since she came to the farm.

The window stood to the right of her bed, and, by stretching an arm,
she could have unbolted the shutters and looked out, but she would have
died rather than do it. Not that she was a coward. But there was some
sinister quality in the night noises of this old Karoo farm that
weighed on her courage and paralyzed her senses. So, instead of
stirring, she lay very still in the darkness, the loud, uncertain beats
of her heart adding themselves to all the other disconcerting