I was making myself courteous by
adding my own escort. I was under no delusion as to my being
useful.

The donkeys were none too fat; they looked as if they had not
been used well, and were far on in life. With their driver I
differed as to beating them, but I will allow that they were dear
to him on the whole, and that he made progress in by no means
easy places. Indeed the road had been against us for many days
before the day on which I left the wagon; and I as wagon
conductor was to blame for the choice of it. I should have
yielded myself patiently to go the mighty round that the main
roads went. I had come almost due east at a venture, and when I
had lost my first stake by being disappointed of the by-road I
sought, I went on gambler-fashion. I had seen already how the
wagon stuck in a big river's sand-bed. How many times we had dug
out, how the whip and the driver's voice had plied, how we had
filled up the ruts with sods and grass-tufts, striving to gain
purchase for the wheels! And yet I was obstinately sanguine when
I heard a tale of an ancient trading road. It would be wondrously
direct, if one could win through by it. So along it, by my own
decision, we went. That first night that we turned off by it, we
stuck long in the waning light, trying to pull through a neck in
the hills. It was grievously cumbered with boulders, and we were
long in trying. Yet at last the driver rallied his team, and we
slept on the right side of the pass, clear of the granite, ready
for an early inspan next day. Then on the morrow we but crawled
along, till at last we stuck fast in a spruit's spongy floor.
That time we were not to pull out before we slept. Darkness drew
in on the struggles of the dead-beat donkeys. We outspanned and
went on with the struggle soon after sunrise, putting shoulders
to wheels in wild earnest. At last we were through, but we had
been delayed far into another day. That noon and afternoon the
disused road traveled through bush-veld. It had been ridden over
so little in the last few years, that there was much wood-cutting
now to be done.

Our voorlooper was no scraggy piccanin, he was brawny and
bearded, an expert Mashona woodman. Now the woods bowed beneath
his sturdy stroke. But his labors took time. One shrank in shame
from the reckoning of miles covered on those days. Sunday came to
our rescue, and we lay encamped in the granite-country, very
grateful for our rest. On the Monday, its results showed.