Standing there within the cave, which had now become his hiding-place,
Colvin Kershaw was conscious of very mingled feelings. His
hiding-place! Why should he be in hiding? why should he not go forth?
Only that to do so would place his life in very serious jeopardy--not at
the moment perhaps, for they would hardly venture to murder him openly
and in broad daylight; besides, he had his revolver on. No, it would be
afterwards, when they could waylay him at some unexpected part of the
track--and what was the use of a revolver against the rifles of two or
more cleverly ambushed foes? They could shoot him down without the
slightest risk to themselves, and shoot him down he knew they would, and
that without a moment's hesitation, once they became aware that he had
discovered their perilous because treasonable secret. He would never
get out of the mountains alive.
Nor was it reassuring when he satisfied himself as to the identity of
the new arrivals, for they were none other than Gideon Roux himself and
Hermanus Delport, the big Dutchman who had fallen foul of Frank Wenlock
at the roadside inn. Both bore characters of evil repute.
Would they never go on? They were talking voluminously, but were too
far off for the burden of their words to travel. The big man was
holding his rifle aloft as though threatening Gert with the butt
thereof; but the Griqua stood his ground, calm and unintimidated. Would
they never go on? Colvin felt his position growing more and more
ignominious. Then again, what if they should conclude to come up and
investigate? But they did not. To his intense relief they put their
horses into the track again and cantered off in the direction whither he
himself was bound.
"Very _schelm_ Boer, Gideon Roux, sir," said Gert, in reply to his
master's questioning. "They asked where my Baas was, and I told them
gone after a reebok. They laughed over an Englishman shooting reebok
with a revolver, when he could not even shoot anything with a rifle.
Then, Baas, Hermanus he said I was a lying Hottentot, and threatened to
knock my brains out with the butt of his gun. He said Hottentots and
Englishmen were equally liars."
"Well, it's of no consequence. But I'm afraid the chances of getting my
money out of Gideon Roux to-day are very poor."
"Does Baas want to get money out of Gideon Roux, then?"
"Of course _I_ do, you ass. He hasn't paid for those sheep yet."
"One hundred and twenty-five pounds, Baas. If I had ten pounds I would
not offer it for the chance of that hundred and twenty-five pounds;" and
Gert shook his head, puckering his face into the most whimsical
expression.
"Well, Gert, I believe you're right. However, I may get some of it.
But I don't think we shall see Gideon. Now that he knows I'm coming up
he won't be at home."
The contrast between Ratels Hoek and Gideon Roux' farm was about in
proportion to that between their respective owners. A long, low
building, with dirty whitewashed walls and thatched roof, standing
against a bleak and desolate hill-slope--the front door opening in two
parts--dilapidated stone kraals, situated on the slope aforesaid, so
that in time of the rains all the drainage thence rushed round the back
wall of the house--some draggle-tailed poultry, and two or three
fever-stricken sheep--this is what Colvin saw as he rode up to his
destination. The while, the air was thick with an awful combination of
adjacent dead goat and a partly decomposed oxhide, in process of
preparation for the making of reims.
Even as he had expected, Gideon Roux was not at home. His wife, a
large, fat, and albeit quite young, already shapeless person, untidy and
slatternly of attire, came forward and tendered a moist paw, with the
simple salutation "_Daag_!" or "good-day"--an example followed by her
sister, who was a replica of herself though a trifle more shapely and
less slovenly but not less awkward. Several brats, in varying stages of
dirt, hung around, finger in mouth, gaping at the new arrival. There
were some strange Boers there too, with whom Colvin exchanged greetings;
but their manner was awkward and constrained. It was a relief to him
when his hostess declared that dinner was ready.
It was an appalling meal to the civilised palate and digestion that to
which they now sat down. There was a stew, fearfully and wonderfully
made, of leathery goat, sweetened to a nauseating point with quince jam,
and, for vegetable, boiled pumpkin, containing almost as much water as
pumpkin. The cloth was excessively grimy, and, worse still, bore many
an ancient stain which showed that the day of its last washing must have
been lost in the mists of antiquity, and there was no salt. The coffee,
moreover, tasted like a decoction of split peas, and was plentifully
interwoven with hair, and straw as from the thatch. The women did not
sit down to table with them, but handed in the dishes from the kitchen,
and then sat and waited until the men had done.
Through all her natural stolidity it struck Colvin that both the
countenance and manner of his hostess wore a flurried, not to say
scared, look. She seemed to try and avoid conversation with him; and it
squared with the fact of Gideon Roux being from home. Could any
information be got out of her? To this end he began to question her in
an artless conversational way.
"Gideon will be in directly, Juffrouw?"
"_Nee_, Mynheer Kershaw. He will not be in. He left home yesterday
morning and I do not expect him back until to-morrow night."
"_So_? That is strange. Why, I thought I saw him just now, the other
side of the _poort_--just half an hour's ride from here. He was coming
in this direction too."
"_Nee, nee_--that cannot be." And the look of alarm upon the woman's
face seemed to deepen.
"Strange that. Why, I even recognised the man who was riding with him.
It looked like Hermanus Delport."
There was no mistaking the effect this time. She looked downright
hideously scared. It could not be, she reiterated. He must have been
mistaken. And then to cover her confusion she turned away to a
cupboard, and, unlocking it, brought out a decanter of Boer brandy,
which she placed upon the table.
"_Maagtig, kerel_!" cried one of the Dutchmen, seizing the bottle
gleefully, and pouring out a copious _soepje_. "It is true you must
have been seeing _spoeks_. The _poort_ is said to be haunted, you
know."
Colvin fell into the humour of the thing seemingly, and replied in like
bantering vein. But he was thinking the while, and thinking hard. The
fear evinced by Gideon Roux' wife would not be manifested by a stolid
practical Boer woman under the mere circumstances of a neighbour having
come to press her husband for the payment of a by no means ruinous debt.
It was something deeper than that. It was more like the demeanour of a
naturally respectable and law-abiding person who was made the
involuntary sharer of some grim and terrible secret, which she dared
neither to divulge nor even hint at. It set him thinking, and the
burden of his thoughts was that his return home should be effected as
much as possible by daylight, and as far as possible by a different
route.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, Gideon Roux was no fool of a Boer, neither was his confederate
Hermanus Delport, consequently, having disappeared over the neck in the
direction of the former's home, they proceeded to execute a backward
manoeuvre. Leaving their horses standing about twenty yards the other
side, and well out of sight, they stealthily retraced their steps until
they could gain a point which commanded a view of Gert Bondelzwart and
the two horses under his charge. Not long had they been there before
they saw all they wanted to see. They saw Colvin emerge from the cave
under the krantz, and descend to where he had left his servant. But
they did not wait until he had rejoined the latter. Mounting their
horses, they sent those astonished animals along at a break-neck gallop,
which brought them to the homestead fully twenty minutes earlier than
the expected visitor. It took them less than five to execute their next
move, which was to exchange their long Martinis for a Mauser rifle
apiece--a weapon which had not then, openly at any rate, reached the
Wildschutsberg section of country, and which they fished out from some
hidden recess. Cartridges and a bottle of `dop' they placed in a
haversack, and with a significant injunction to their fellow-countrymen
there gathered, to keep the Englishman talking and making merry as late
as possible, they rode off into the veldt again, taking a line which
would put them out of sight of the house in about three minutes.
"He knows too much, that damned Englishman," snarled Gideon Roux,
shading a match to light his pipe, while his steed took him along at a
fast "triple." He was a sinister-looking, swarthy-faced Boer, with a
short black beard and a great hooked nose like the beak of a bird of
prey. "We must teach him--him and his Hottentot--not to come pushing
his snout into other people's affairs."
"That is so," assented the other. "But, Gideon, what if there is a
noise made about it, and they are found afterwards? The English will
hang us. And he is a friend of Oom Stephanus."
"_Maagtig_! By the time they are found the English will not be here to
hang anybody, and we, _ou' maat_ [old chum]--we shall have deserved the
thanks of all true patriots for having put out of the way an enemy of
our country. Oom Stephanus--well, he is a patriot now, his own nephew,
Adrian De la Rey, told me so. What is one cursed Englishman more than
another to a good patriot. He cannot be a friend to such."
"That is so," replied the big Boer laconically.
For about an hour they kept on their way, and their way was a rough one,
for they avoided the regular track, winding in and out among the
mountains, now putting their horses up a steep boulder-strewn slope,
then being obliged to dismount in order to lead the animals down a kind
of natural rock staircase. Finally, they drew rein upon a neck, where,
lying between two great boulders, themselves utterly invisible from
below, they could command the broken, winding, rocky track for some
little distance, either way.
"He cannot be here yet," said Gideon Roux as he scanned the road, which,
like a snake, wound along the valley beneath. "Hans Vermaak will see to
that. Only, I hope Katrina will not let them have too much to drink.
Hans is quite fool enough to get drunk and jolly, and insist on the
Englishman stopping the night Hans is the devil to drink, and then he
becomes jolly. That is where he is such a fool."
They hid the horses well down over the other side of the ridge, lest the
approach of the other animals should cause them to neigh, then returned
to their positions under the rocks. The road was about three hundred
yards beneath, and on the other side of it was the river bed, now dry.
This circumstance, too, came into the strategy of the murderous pair.
"See now, Mani," [Hermanus abbreviated], said Gideon Roux. "If we shoot
as we always shoot, both will drop into the river bed. And to-night,"
looking upward at a black cloud which was thickly and gradually
spreading, "the river will come down. I will take the Englishman, and
you take the Hottentot."
"_Ja_, but I am not so sure with these damned Mausers," growled Hermanus
Delport, looking up and down his weapon. "I might miss--then where
would we be? We had better have kept to our old Martinis. We
understand them."
"_Nee, nee_. It comes to the same thing, I tell you, and if you miss
you can go on shooting until you _raak_. I know _I_ shan't miss.
_Maagtig, kerel_! What are you doing? Put away that pipe!"
But Hermanus protested he was not going to do without his smoke for all
the adjectival English in Africa or in England either, and it took at
least ten minutes of his confederate's time and talk to persuade him
that not only the spark but the smoke of a pipe was visible for any
distance in the clear, yet half-gloomy atmosphere then prevailing. For
the leaden lour of the heavens pointed to the coming of a storm.
In effect the surroundings were very much in harmony with the dark deed
of blood which these two miscreants were here to perpetrate. The wild
and rugged recesses of the Wildschutsbergen, sparsely inhabited and but
seldom travelled, spread around in grim, forbidding desolation. Great
krantzes towered skyward, rearing up from the apex of smooth
boulder-strewn grass slopes, and here and there a lofty coffee-canister
shaped cone, turret-headed, and belted round with the same smooth
cliff-face, stood like a giant sentinel. Below, the valleys, deep and
rugged, seamed with dongas, and that through which the track lay,
skirting the now dry bed of the Sneeuw River. No sign of life was upon
this abode of desolation; no grazing flock, or stray _klompje_ of
horses, not even a bird, springing chirruping from the grass; and away
yonder the further crags stood against a background of inky cloud,
which, gradually working nearer, amid low mutterings of thunder, was
bringing the storm which should act as accomplice in hiding the slain
victims of the two ambushed murderers.
"That is right," chuckled Gideon Roux, rubbing his hands. "The river
will come down to-night like the devil. By this time to-morrow the
Englishman and his Hottentot will be nearly at the sea. It is hundreds
of miles off, but a flooded river travels as quick as a train."
"What if they are stranded half-way?" said the other, with an evil
sneer.
"Then the jackals will eat them. Either way it matters nothing."
Darker and darker it grew. The storm cloud began to throw out loose
masses of flying scud, through which the moon now and again shone out in
fitful gleam. Still, to these two their prey came not in sight.
"I like not this," growled Hermanus. "This is no light to shoot by. We
may miss one or both, and to miss one is as bad as to miss both.
Besides, the river may not take them down after all. We two may be
hanged for to-night's work, Gideon."
"Hanged? Oh, yes! See now, Mani, why I would have it done with
Mausers. Their bullet makes a small hole, our Martini bullet makes a
large hole. And there is not a Mauser or a Lee-Metford in the
Wildschutsberg. Afterwards our guns are examined, and they are the old
Martinis. Our bullet does not fit the hole. Now, do you not see, you
_eselkop_?"
"_Ja_, I see. But--_stil, man_. Here they come."
A clink of the hoof of a shod horse coming down the track was borne
faintly upward. The two assassins crouched in their ambush, a tigerish
glare in their eyes. Their pieces were levelled.
"Ready, Hermanus," whispered Gideon Roux. "When they come six paces the
other side of yon white stone, then shoot."