I said, "although you Afrikanders have pretty well cleaned out
the Free State and Transvaal, there is still a good deal of game beyond.
Along the Sabi River, for instance!"

"Yes, yes," said the old fellow, "that's right enough; but even there
the heavy game's going. Why, how many elephants does a man now get in a
season's hunt? Eight or ten, perhaps,--if he is a good man,--and thinks
himself lucky. Why, _Kerel_, when I first hunted along the Crocodile, I
shot sixty elephants to my own _roer_ (gun) in five months. That was
something like a game country,--elephants and rhinoceros as common as
goats in a kraal."

"Was that the season you met the Frenchman?" I inquired, with a smile.

"No, no," briskly responded Cornelis, with a sly look towards the room
where the vrouw still sat. "Not that season, nor the next. But you
would like to hear the yarn, and it always make me laugh to tell it.
Laughter is good. I was always a merry one, and that, thank the Heer
God, is the reason I have got so well through my troubles. Your
sour-faced fellow is no good for the long trek through life.

"Well, well! It was a funny business that of the good vrouw there and
the little Frenchman. It happened in this way. In the third year after
we had got into the Transvaal, about two years after we had driven
Moselikatse and his _verdomde_ (infernal) Matabele rascals beyond the
Crocodile, I was shooting elephants up in the north. The vrouw was with
me, and the children,--we had three young children then,--and we had
made a big _scherm_ (camp) some way south of the Crocodile, a few miles
out of reach of the `fly,' [Tse-tse fly] which, I can tell you, was in
those days a terrible pest.

"The first time I met Pierre Cellois--`Klein Pierre' we used to call
him--I was about a day east of our camp, shooting water-buck for
_velschoens_. We had worn out our foot-gear, and wanted fresh supplies
of skin. Never shall I forget the little Frenchman's appearance. He
was tricked out in a big slouch hat smothered with great white ostrich
feathers--enough to frighten half the game of the country away. Then he
had a bright blue jacket with gilt buttons, a pink flannel shirt, a red
silk sash round his waist--something like what your officers wore across
their shoulders at Boom Plaats, when we fought Sir Harry Smith--white
breeches, and long, shiny, black English hunting-boots. In his sash he
had stuck a long knife and a pair of pistols. At his s