a whisper, 'Dick, my old friend.'

The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were stretched out
to me. I gripped his hands, and for a little we did not speak. Then I
saw how woefully he had changed. His left leg had shrunk, and from the
knee down was like a pipe stem. His face, when awake, showed the lines
of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by half a foot. But his eyes
were still like Mary's. Indeed they seemed to be more patient and
peaceful than in the days when he sat beside me on the buck-waggon and
peered over the hunting-veld.

I picked him up--he was no heavier than Mary--and carried him to his
chair beside the stove. Then I boiled water and made tea, as we had so
often done together.

'Peter, old man,' I said, 'we're on trek again, and this is a very snug
little _rondavel_. We've had many good yarns, but this is going to be
the best. First of all, how about your health?'

'Good, I'm a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow. I have been
lonely sometimes, but that is all by now. Tell me of the big battles.'

But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case. He had
no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like Germans. The
doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and had done their
best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones had been so wrecked
that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had all the Boer's dislike
of amputation. One doctor had been in Damaraland and talked to him of
those baked sunny places and made him homesick. But he returned always
to his dislike of Germans. He had seen them herding our soldiers like
brute beasts, and the commandant had a face like Stumm and a chin that
stuck out and wanted hitting. He made an exception for the great airman
Lensch, who had downed him.

'He is a white man, that one,' he said. 'He came to see me in hospital
and told me a lot of things. I think he made them treat me well. He is
a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he has a round, merry
face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who could put a bullet through
a pauw's head at two hundred yards. He said he was sorry I was lame,
for he hoped to have more fights with me. Some woman that tells
fortunes had said that I would be the end of him, but he reckoned she
had got the thing the wrong way on. I hope he will come through this
war, for he is a good man, though a German ... But the others! They are
like the fool in the Bible, fat and ugly in