they gone to now?” “They’ve shot Peter Halket!”--“The Captain saw them
do it”--“Stand ready, they may come back any time!”
When the Englishman came, the other men, who knew he had been a medical
student, made way for him. He knelt down by Peter Halket.
“He’s dead,” he said, quietly.
When they had turned him over, the Colonial knelt down on the other
side, with a little hand-lamp in his hand.
“What are you fellows fooling about here for?” cried the Captain. “Do
you suppose it’s any use looking for foot marks after all this tramping!
Go, guard the camp on all sides!”
“I will send four coloured boys,” he said to the Englishman and the
Colonial, “to dig the grave. You’d better bury him at once; there’s no
use waiting. We start first thing in the morning.”
When they were alone, the Englishman uncovered Peter Halket’s breast.
There was one small wound just under the left bosom; and one on the
crown of the head; which must have been made after he had fallen down.
“Strange, isn’t it, what he can have been doing here?” said the
Colonial; “a small wound, isn’t it?”
“A pistol shot,” said the Englishman, closing the bosom.
“A pistol--”
The Englishman looked up at him with a keen light in his eye.
“I told you he would not kill that nigger.--See--here--” He took up the
knife which had fallen from Peter Halket’s grasp, and fitted it into a
piece of the cut leather that lay on the earth.
“But you don’t think--” The Colonial stared at him with wide open eyes;
then he glanced round at the Captain’s tent.
“Yes, I think that--Go and fetch his great-coat; we’ll put him in it. If
it is no use talking while a man is alive, it is no use talking when he
is dead!”
They brought his great-coat, and they looked in the pockets to see if
there was anything which might show where he had come from or who his
friends were. But there was nothing in the pockets except an empty
flask, and a leathern purse with two shillings in, and a little
hand-made two-pointed cap.
So they wrapped Peter Halket up in his great-coat, and put the little
cap on his head.
And, one hour after Peter Halket had stood outside the tent looking up,
he was lying under the little tree, with the red sand trodden down over
him, in which a black man and a white man’s blood were mingled.
All the rest of the night the men sat up round the fires, discussing
what had happened, dreading an attack.
But the Englishman and the Colonial went to their tent, to lie down.
“Do you think they will make any inquiries?” asked the Colonial.
“Why should they? His time will be up tomorrow.”
“Are you going to say anything?”
“What is the use?”
They lay in the dark for an hour, and heard the men chatting outside.
“Do you believe in a God?” said the Englishman, suddenly.
The Colonial started: “Of course I do!”
“I used to,” said the Englishman; “I do not believe in your God; but I
believed in something greater than I could understand, which moved in
this earth, as your soul moves in your body. And I thought this worked
in such wise, that the law of cause and effect, which holds in the
physical world, held also in the moral: so, that the thing we call
justice, ruled. I do not believe it any more. There is no God in
Mashonaland.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” cried the Colonial, much distressed. “Are you
going off your head, like poor Halket?”
“No; but there is no God,” said the Englishman. He turned round on his
shoulder, and said no more: and afterwards the Colonial went to sleep.
Before dawn the next morning the men had packed up the goods, and
started.
By five o’clock the carts had filed away; the men rode or walked before
and behind them; and the space where the camp had been was an empty
circle; save for a few broken bottles and empty tins, and the stones
about which the fires had been made, round which warm ashes yet lay.
Only under the little stunted tree, the Colonial and the Englishman were
piling up stones. Their horses stood saddled close by.
Presently the large trooper came riding back. He had been sent by the
Captain to ask what they were fooling behind for, and to tell them to
come on.
The men mounted their horses to follow him; but the Englishman turned
in his saddle and looked back. The morning sun was lighting up the
straggling branches of the tall trees that had overshadowed the
camp; and fell on the little stunted tree, with its white stem and
outstretched arms; and on the stones beneath it.
“It’s all that night on the kopje!” said the Colonial, sadly.
But the Englishman looked back. “I hardly know,” he said, “whether it is
not better for him now, than for us.”
Then they rode on after the troop.