s far as where Jantje was standing at the
horses' heads. Here he stopped, and, putting his hand in his pocket,
took out a two-shilling piece and threw it to the Hottentot, calling to
him to catch it.

Jantje was holding the horses with one hand. In the other he held his
stick--a long walking kerrie that he always carried, the same on which
he had shown Bessie the notches. In order to secure the piece of money
he dropped the stick, and Muller's quick eye catching sight of the
notches beneath the knob, he stooped down, picked it up, and examined
it.

"What do these mean, boy?" he asked, pointing to the line of big and
little notches, some of which had evidently been cut years ago.

Jantje touched his hat, spat upon the "Scotchman," as the natives of
that part of Africa call a two-shilling piece,[*] and pocketed it before
he answered. The fact that the giver had murdered all his near relations
did not make the gift less desirable in his eyes. Hottentot moral sense
is not very elevated.

[*] Because once upon a time a Scotchman made a great
impression on the simple native mind in Natal by palming off
some thousands of florins among them at the nominal value of
half a crown.

"No, Baas," he said with a curious grin, "that is how I reckon. If
anybody beats Jantje, Jantje cuts a notch upon the stick, and every
night before he goes to sleep he looks at it and says, 'One day you will
strike that man twice who struck you once,' and so on, Baas. Look, what
a line of them there are, Baas. One day I shall pay them all back again,
Baas Frank."

Muller abruptly dropped the stick, and followed John towards the house.
It was a much better building than the Boers generally indulge in, and
the sitting-room, though innocent of flooring--unless clay and cowdung
mixed can be called a floor--was more or less covered with mats made of
springbuck skins. In the centre of the room stood a table made of
the pretty _buckenhout_ wood, which has the appearance of having been
industriously pricked all over with a darning-needle, and round it were
chairs and couches of stinkwood, and seated with rimpis or strips of
hide.

In one big chair at the end of the room, busily employed in doing
nothing, sat _Tanta_ (Aunt) Coetzee, the wife of Old Hans, a large and
weighty woman, who evidently had once been rather handsome; and on
the couches were some half-dozen Boers, their rifles in their hands or
between their knees.

It stru