d hero, not so many
years gone past. Now he was an Ishmael, receding and receding
before the tide of civilization. Like the eagle in Byron's lines
on Kirke White, he might blame himself, or at any rate credit
himself, for the turn things had taken. He had winged the shaft
that was draining his life, or at least his livelihood. He had
helped to bring on a native war that had expedited matters. He
had helped to wind it up in a very few months.

So now the abomination of civilization, as he deemed it, was set
up in high places of the land. It was increasingly hard for him
to be a law to himself anywhere within the land's limits. He had
retired further and further yet again into the fastnesses of the
hill-country. Yet civilization had a graceless way of looking him
up.

He was just by the Portuguese border when I visited him. I knew
him of old, and I wanted him to let his eldest son come to
school. He had told me a year ago to ask again.

I went through a frowning gorge of rocks to the part-deserted
kraal, and found him sitting at his beer with three native
courtiers. He was a tall West-countryman, with a ragged dark
beard. His khaki was badly stained, and his hair was poking
through his hat. He spoke the tongue of this southern country
most volubly. He also reinforced it with ne'er-do-well words from
Europe that did her no particular credit. Just as I came up a
quarrel was in full swing. A free fight followed. Carrot broke a
black earthen pot over the head of one of those three. Out came
his swarthy wife that he had paid many cattle for, with his baby
in a goat-skin at her back; also his other children, aged about
eight, six, five, and four.

There was much confused crying and protesting. But Carrot
dominated the scene in the end. The courtiers retired crying
'Shame!' and under protest. The most truculent of them was
bleeding freely from his broken head. I followed him to their
hamlet far down among the rocks and bandaged him. I camped
outside the Carrot homestead that night and the next day, and
learned something of the family's way of life.

Carrot was shooting big buck sable and roan without a license, I
gathered. He was trading cattle for most of the venison that he
amassed. He had by now a goodly herd feeding in a green vlei near
the border. By and by he would sell them, he thought, and set
himself up in a wayside public-house. That was to say, if an
ungrateful Government could be squared somehow. He chuckled