the name of some beauty-spot to visit,
and were told Cintra and shown the road to it. I wanted a quiet place
to talk, for I had a good deal to say to Peter Pienaar.

I christened that car the Lusitanian Terror, and it was a marvel that
we did not smash ourselves up. There was something immortally wrong
with its steering gear. Half a dozen times we slewed across the road,
inviting destruction. But we got there in the end, and had luncheon in
an hotel opposite the Moorish palace. There we left the car and
wandered up the slopes of a hill, where, sitting among scrub very like
the veld, I told Peter the situation of affairs.

But first a word must be said about Peter. He was the man that taught
me all I ever knew of veld-craft, and a good deal about human nature
besides. He was out of the Old Colony--Burgersdorp, I think--but he
had come to the Transvaal when the Lydenburg goldfields started. He
was prospector, transport-rider, and hunter in turns, but principally
hunter. In those early days he was none too good a citizen. He was in
Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means. Then he took
to working off bogus gold propositions on Kimberley and Johannesburg
magnates, and what he didn't know about salting a mine wasn't
knowledge. After that he was in the Kalahari, where he and Scotty
Smith were familiar names. An era of comparative respectability dawned
for him with the Matabele War, when he did uncommon good scouting and
transport work. Cecil Rhodes wanted to establish him on a stock farm
down Salisbury way, but Peter was an independent devil and would call
no man master. He took to big-game hunting, which was what God
intended him for, for he could track a tsessebe in thick bush, and was
far the finest shot I have seen in my life. He took parties to the
Pungwe flats, and Barotseland, and up to Tanganyika. Then he made a
speciality of the Ngami region, where I once hunted with him, and he
was with me when I went prospecting in Damaraland.

When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great hunters,
took the British side and did most of our intelligence work in the
North Transvaal. Beyers would have hanged him if he could have caught
him, and there was no love lost between Peter and his own people for
many a day. When it was all over and things had calmed down a bit, he
settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me when I went on trek. At the
time when I left Africa two years before,