found him communicative till
that last night before reaching home. 'I'm better where I am
earning a sure living,' he went on. 'I've got a boy put to school
at Southampton; no, not mine I'm not married. But he's staying at
school a long while. I don't particularly want him to go out to
South Africa, speaking for myself. His father didn't do
particularly well there as people reckon, but yet I don't know.
He enjoyed his life in his own way, I think. I saw enough of him
to understand that, and the boy seems bound to go back there:
bound or tied's the very word. He was born up the country, and
carried on a Kaffir woman's back in her goatskin, and knew more
Kaffir than English, and wore veld-schoen when he came back on
the boat with me.' 'When was that?' I asked. 'When his father,
Walter Holmes, came aboard seven years ago come this next March.
That was the second time his father traveled with me. He came on
before, fifteen years earlier, when first he traveled to Africa,
and I remembered him well enough. I was on the old boat. I've
only served on the two boats all my time.' 'What did he go out to
do?' I asked. 'Oh! he went up to join the pioneers at Kimberley.
A counter-jumper he'd been, and he'd got his head all stuffed
full. It was 1890, one of Rhodes' big years, the year they went
north. It would have done you good to hear him talk. He was so
keen, and his eyes glowed. Just like the water glows near the
keel in the tropics.' 'That must have been a time,' I said; 'I've
only read about it. It was before I saw the country.' The sailor
grinned and spat. 'I reckon there hadn't been better days for
young fellows to live in,' he said, 'not since Queen Elizabeth's
reign. It came just between the two Jubilees the time. Kimberley
and Rhodesia and the native wars and the Raid, and the big war
looming on ahead for by and by. I reckon it was something like it
was in Drake's and Hawkins' and Sir Walter's days.' That was a
new view to me. But it sounded likely enough to hear him bring it
out, who believed in it so evidently. 'It was all Ophir and El
Dorado,' he went on; 'I used to hear lots of it from people to
and fro. I'd see them going out to Africa and all the excitement
after the lagging times along the coast, when they came with the
dawn into Table Bay. I'd see them coming back, too, greedy enough
to see Portland Light then, like that stout party over there.' He
pointed to a paunchy miner who was flinging his leather cap up.
'H