y wagon.
All the people--elephant-hunters, malcontents, broken men, and Doppers--
were animated by one and the same sentiment. They were sick of the
Transvaal. There had been too much fighting--and badly managed
fighting--with Sekukuni and other Kaffirs; too many commandos; taxes,
those hateful creations of civilisation, were increasing, and were
actually being enforced; President Burgers had been too go-ahead, too
_hoogmoedag_ (high and mighty); the seasons had been bad; and the
English--those hateful English--were slowly finding their way to the
north. And so the great Promised Land trek--a trek talked of for years
past--was at last gathered together.

Some of these Boers, the Doppers, and they who had lived farthest from
the rude semi-civilisation of that day, were possessed with the wildest
beliefs. They imagined that Egypt lay just across the Zambesi River,
not so very far to the north; they were convinced that they were setting
forth to a land somewhere in the dim north-west, beyond Lake N'gami,
where ranged snow-clad mountains beneath which sheltered a veldt rich in
water, in cattle, and in corn and pasture lands, where the great game
wandered just as plentifully as they had wandered in the Transvaal and
Free State forty years before, when their fathers had crossed the Orange
River and possessed the soil. Seventy wagons and more now stood beside
the Crocodile, whose owners, heartily weary of the delays that had taken
place, now anxiously awaited the return of two deputies sent to Khama,
Chief of Bamangwato, through whose country they first had to pass.

One afternoon about this time a great wagon lumbered in to swell the
already unwieldy proportions of the trek, and outspanned under a big
tree. Word went slowly round the camp that Piet Van Staden, from
Zoutpansberg, with his wife and child, had come in. Piet's arrival in
itself would have created no great stir, for Piet was a very average
type of Transvaal Boer--big, not ill-looking, heavy and inert, and with
very little to say for himself--but Piet's wife was no ordinary person.
She was a woman of striking beauty, far surpassing the dull ruck of
South African Dutch vrouws, and possessed, moreover, of so much
originality and determination of character as to have scandalised more
than once her sober-minded countrywomen.

The men of Zoutpansberg swore by her. Had she not taken a rifle and
ridden out time after time with her husband into the low veldt towa