stream, where it ran deep and slow, and curved curiously between little
hard headlands of rock and easy bosoms of sand; so that when he was
plying the great sledge and cutting out the stone in big, flat cakes,
he was hidden from the lads who dug on the foundations of the house, a
couple of hundred paces away. There was little enough to fear now, but
his old lore of war still governed him, and he carried his rifle to his
work with him, and had chosen to work in a spot where he could not be
suddenly approached by one coming secretly through the hummocks. Here,
at noon, on the fourth or fifth day of the building, he was laboring
happily. His was the part to swing the great sledge on the wedges;
three, four full-bodied blows, each ringing true as a bell on the iron
wedges, and a fat, flat slice of stone jarred loose from the body of
the rock, to be hauled apart by the kafirs; and then in with the wedges
again. He had joy in his strength, and in the pretty skill of never
missing the head of the wedge; so that he worked on without fatigue
and did not look about him. It was when another big flake of stone was
broken away, that an exclamation from one of the kafirs made him turn
sharply to look up-stream.
He was never sure what manner of man he saw, watching him from the far
side of the spruit. For one thing, there was sweat in his eyes; for
another, he turned to grasp his rifle, and when he turned back, the
man was gone. But in the couple of moments that the man was in view,
Piet saw that he was white, a short, strongly-built white man, dark
against the pale sand. And though he could never find a phrase for
the impression in his mind, the thing that puzzled him was the utter
strangeness of the man's appearance. Whether it was the fashion of his
clothes, his attitude, his looks, or just the mere whole of him, he
could never explain. But, "it seemed to me as if he were none of God's
making," he always added.
It was a matter of no more than a couple of breaths; then his
bewilderment broke up, and caution took its place. He bustled his
kafirs together and shepherded them out of the streambed and back to
the camp, coming last with his rifle cocked in the crook of his arm to
guard against any possible danger. He saw that work had ceased in the
foundations of the house; the lads and the kafirs were gathered in a
knot in the pit, and their voices buzzed in talk. But he gave no notice
to that.
"We are being watched," he said to them. "Back to the laager and get
your guns."
And once again the square of wagons became a fort, and the little
family stood to its arms against all comers, for its right to live in
the place it had chosen.
Piet told them what he had seen; it was little enough, and he had no
key to its meaning. Susanna, having helped to lay the spare rifles
and the ammunition ready, had gone back to her fire, for pots must be
watched though the veld were alive with enemies. The men, each standing
on a wagon wheel, searching the country with keen eyes, turned the
thing over in their minds.
"You are sure he was white, father?" asked Jan.
Piet was quite sure.
"And he had no gun?"
"No," replied Piet. "He had nothing in his hands at all."
They spoke without turning their heads or ceasing for an instant in the
watch they kept.
"Then," said Klein Piet, with assurance, "it must be the English. Only
the English go about without guns in a wild country, and collect taxes."
The explanation seemed reasonable to them all; they would have been
less dismayed if a black foe had shown himself in force. The feeling
that dragged the Boer people up by the roots and set them trekking
into the unknown was no mere antipathy to taxation; it was founded on
an abiding mistrust and hatred of the English who were multiplying in
the land. Piet's strong face took on an added grimness as Klein Piet's
explanation forced itself on him.
"But perhaps," suggested Andries, the youngest, "it is just an
Englishman on trek. He would not trouble us."
That was a comfortable thought, too. Piet kept his boys on watch for
another hour, but nothing showed, and then they ate quickly, and he
disposed them for a search. It was all done in good order and after the
approved fashion; as each moved forward, his retreat was covered by
another's rifle; and between them they scoured all the broken ground
within a couple of miles.
"Well," said Piet at last, when the search was over and they had not
found so much as a spoor of a foot, "this is a wonderful thing."
"You are sure it was a man you saw?" asked Klein Piet, doubtfully. "The
sun plays tricks with a man's eyes, sometimes."
But Piet was not to be shaken. "As sure," he said, "as I am here. But
what kind of man--" he broke off, frowning. "There is nothing for it,"
he added, "but to go on with the work and be wary."
"Yes, the work." Klein Piet turned to him. "When you came back from the
spruit, we had just found a curious thing where we were digging."
"An iron cross," put in young Andries.
"A cross?" repeated the father.
"It is not a cross," said Klein Piet, quickly. "It is--something else.
Come and see it, father."
They had been talking together outside their laager, and now they went
across to the great pit that the lads and the kafirs had dug to plant
the house in. The digging was not yet all done, and where the morning's
labor had ended, Klein Piet pointed to the thing of which he had
spoken. Only a part of it was uncovered--two curving, spade-ended arms
of rust-red iron, and a shaft which stuck out of the earth.
"Is that not a cross, father?" cried Andries. "See, it has arms and----"
Piet shook his head. "No, it's no cross," he answered. "How can it have
come here? I remember once a man who rode on commando, an Englishman,
and he had pictures of such things as this on his arms, pricked into
the skin. This is an anchor, a piece of a ship."
Klein Piet, standing by his side, laughed suddenly, so short and harsh
a laugh that Piet turned to him in surprise.
"I might have known," said Klein Piet. "Of course it is part of a ship.
There have been ships here, once; can't you _feel_ that there have been
ships hereabouts?"
At another time Piet would have shown little patience with this manner
of talk; but now his mind was full of other concerns, and he let it
pass.
"We must dig the thing out," he said. "It will be heavy to lift,
though. Take a pair of spades and see how big it is."
Klein Piet and Jan jumped down into the pit and set to work, while
Andries and Piet watched. It was no hard matter to unbury the shank
of the anchor; the easy earth came away in heaping shovelfuls, and
presently the whole of it lay bare, with its great wooden stock rotted
to threads and its ring pitted and thin with rust. Jan leaned on his
shovel and stared at it; Klein Piet knelt by it and swept away earth
with his hands.
"Perhaps there was a wreck here," Piet was saying. "Some ship may have
been driven up by a storm and the sea have beaten it to pieces, so that
all the wooden parts floated away and this was left."
Klein Piet, on his knees, still grubbing away with his hands, laughed
at him.
"No," he said. "That is not so, father. For there is a chain fast to
this anchor."
He had worried a hole with his hands, and sure enough, when they came
to look, there was a link of a great chain running from the anchor ring
into the earth.
"Now," said Klein Piet, rising from his knees; "who will tell me what
the other end of that chain is fast to?"
It was a strange thing for a house-building Boer to find; their shovels
only showed them that there was a long chain there, running level
perhaps six feet below the surface of the ground. They bared a couple
of fathoms of it, red as gold with its long burial, and then Piet bade
them halt.
"We must cut it," he said. "It will be hard work, but plainer to do
than digging up the whole of it. And for to-day, let us go back to
camp and leave it."
Piet was a little resentful of these things that had arrived to disturb
the course of his work. First, the sudden stranger who left no spoor
where he walked, and now the anchor lying where the roots of his home
should be--they were beyond the calculations of an upright Boer. Like
many more sophisticated men, Piet relied on his environment possessing
a certain quality; when foreign elements colored it, when it was
flavored with unascertained ingredients, a sort of helplessness sapped
his powers; he was like a man walking blindfold. Only his bull-headed
pluck served him at such times; and now, when he doubted and was
uneasy, he held on without hesitation in the task he had undertaken.
A _brand-wacht_ was maintained that night, the four of them taking
turns to sit sentry by the great wood fire; and though, during his turn
of the watch, the night seemed alive with lurking men who stared and
slunk, he faced the new dawn with no leak in his courage.
That day, they set to work at cutting through the great chain that was
fast to the anchor ring. Their equipment for such a purpose was poor;
there was nothing for it but to flog a cold chisel through the wrought
iron; and though the rust flaked from it if one but scratched with a
fingernail, the metal below was sound and tough yet, a heartbreaking
thing to assault with mere strength of arm. Further, there is a science
of cutting with the cold edge which was outside all their knowledge.
The younger lads took turns to hold the chisel while Piet and Klein
Piet, swinging alternately, rung a strenuous bob-major on its head; but
the hot hours passed in sweat and labor, and afternoon was upon them,
while the chain seemed scarcely scratched. It was cruel work for all
of them, jarring to the arms and stunning to the ears. At last, Piet
dropped his sledge-hammer and wiped the wet from his face.
"Honest men made that chain," he said. "We shall be all to-morrow
cutting at it. Hullo! What kafir is this?"
None of them had seen the approach of the kafir who now stood on the
edge of the pit looking down at them; he carried his hand to his head
in a salute as they looked up at him. He was an old kafir, with tufts
of white on his chin and a skin hanging on his loins, gaunt and big
and upstanding, with a kind of dignity that was new to them in kafirs.
He supported their stare with no embarrassment, and gave them back an
unabashed regard of quiet curiosity.
"Who are you?" demanded Piet. "Where do you come from?"
But the kafir could speak no Dutch; he made a reply in some tongue
of his own, sonorous and full-throated, and raised his hand again in
salute.
"We must know where he comes from," said Piet to the lads. "Between
ourselves and our own kafirs, we must find some language he can
understand."
They came out of the pit and took the kafir back to the camp with them,
leaving their tools where they lay. The old man went in obedience to
their gestures without demur, and squatted himself on his hams to
be talked to. The average Boer knows no native tongues; he will not
condescend so far to the kafir; but Piet and his sons had yielded to
their vicissitudes, and between them could command quite a number of
dialects. Tembu, Fingo and the "kitchen kafir" of the Cape
failed to gain any response; Klein Piet's few words of Bechuana only
made the old man laugh; the Griqua "clicks" made him laugh more. Then,
by an inspiration, Piet put a question in Basuto, the harsh speech of
the mountaineers. Up went the black hand in a salute, and the old kafir
replied in the same tongue.
"I am a doctor," he told them. "I am of The Men (the Zulus). I am
walking north to my own people."
He spoke with a seriousness that was like courtesy, so attentive and
gracious. To each of Piet's questions he gave a considered answer,
ample and careful. There was no war in these parts, he told them; the
nearest kraal was four days away. In any case, his people would not
concern themselves with a single family of white people; they had
nothing to fear.
"But," said Piet, "since I have been here, I have seen another white
man. He watched me at work from a distance. Do you know who he was?"
The old kafir listened to him with a sedulous attention.
"It is said," he answered, "that white men have been seen hereabouts.
My grandfather saw them, and his father. But I have never seen them."
Piet stared at him. "Your grandfather?" he cried. "But I saw him
yesterday."
The old kafir nodded. "It is a tale that is told," he said. "A very
old tale. White men came from yonder--" his lean finger waved to the
darkling sea southwards,--"traveling on the water in a ----" he paused
for a word.
"A ship," said Piet. "I know."
The old man nodded. "This was in the old times, before we Men had come
to this country," he went on; "when white men were dreams. Here their
ship halted; and that same night, the great wind of the year drove
down on them. It was a wind that struck men as with a club and killed
them; it lifted the sea as mowers lift hay and stacked it high on the
veld, so that here where we sit was all water, and the shore was a mile
inland. And with the water, the wind carried their ship, plunging and
turning like a cow in a torrent; when the sea went back to its place,
it stood here on the land, great and wonderful, with its white men
swarming about it. That iron at which you were sweating was the hook
with which they held their ship in one place."
Evening had come upon them while they talked; its shadows were cast
over the sea and the shore, and the old kafir's strong face was lit
by the leaping fire at which they sat. Piet looked over his shoulder
at the darkling dome of the night, under which they sat in a hush of
solitude.
"Yes," he said. "And what became of them?"
The old kafir spread his hands asunder before him.
"Who can tell?" he answered. "They were killed, of course; the kafirs
who had escaped to the hills came back and made war on them. It lasted
a while, for the white men fought cleverly; but in the end, there was a
creeping by night, a narrowing ring of assegais, the hush of stealth;
and last the roar of the warcry and a charge. The kafirs thronged on
that ship like ants on a carrion; in the middle of it, the white men
put fire to their powder, and all the ship and the fighters vanished in
a spring of fire. Yes, all the white men were killed; but still they
have been seen, slinking through the hills and returning by the stream.
They were killed, but who is to say what became of them?"
The four Boers looked at one another; their breath came short and
harsh. Piet recalled all that sense of strangeness with which the sight
of the man by the stream had filled him; the growing night was suddenly
dangerous and fearful.
Klein Piet turned to the old kafir. "All this was very long ago?" he
said.
The kafir considered, with a forefinger that calculated on the fingers
of his other hand.
"My grandfather was old," he said. "So old that he was blind. And _his_
grandfather had heard it as a tale of olden times."
Piet was still in thrall to the awe of the thing.
"Then I saw a spirit?" he demanded.
The old kafir shrugged, and a silence fell between them all. Jan
and Andries had understood less than the half of what was said, but
the ill-ease reached them like a contagion and they sat very close
together, their eyes wide open and quick.
Piet was about to ask further questions, when Jan suddenly gripped his
brother and started.
"Hark!" he cried. "What is that?"
The quick alarm strung them all to tenseness; only the old kafir cocked
his eyebrow humorously and spat into the fire. The others rested where
they sat, straining their ears.
"There!" cried Jan again.
It was a dull noise of metal on metal that they heard, a muffled ring
and clink; it sounded again and again.
"Someone is cutting at the chains," said Piet hoarsely.
"It is they," said Klein Piet.
Susanna's hand stole into Piet's arm; he had almost forgotten that she
was sitting a little behind him, so still had she been. But the touch
of her hand made him the equal of his terrors; the man with a wife to
shield cannot afford fears. He pressed her hand and rose to his feet.
"We are shivering like old women round a death-bed," he said. "Klein
Piet, get your rifle; we will see who is mending our work for us."
Klein Piet obeyed, swallowing to ease his tight throat; the old
kafir rose too, and the three of them went forth from the light of
the fires and across the crisp grass to that dark pit where yet the
"clink, clink" of the unseen work was sounding. Piet and his son
walked abreast, the kafir a little behind them; his bare feet were
soundless as he strode. The Boer was conscious of no fear; only of a
strange lightening of his senses and a pricking in his skin such as he
had known when he had lain on his rifle at night waiting for a charge
of kafirs. As they went, the sound of the hammers grew clearer, till
they could pick out the heavy note of the great sledge and the lighter
cadence of the top-mall. They halted by an end of bush to mark the
steady ring of them and make sure of their breath; the old kafir went
on a few paces.
"So the tale was true," they heard him say; and then Piet sprang out,
with Klein Piet at his heels, flung up his gun, and fired at the pit.
The smoke of the shot blew back into their faces; its noise, peremptory
and sudden, thrust their alert faculties from their poise; an effort
was needed ere they saw clear again. The pit was empty.
"What did you see?" cried Klein Piet.
"I don't know," answered Piet. "I thought--but I don't know. Let us go
and see what _they_ have done to the chain."
Klein Piet had his tinderbox in his pocket; by the light he made, they
both bent to look at the link on the ground.
"It is deeper," said Klein Piet. "The cut is half through the iron."
They went back to the camp in a silence of utter bewilderment. To his
wife's look and the questions of the younger boys, Piet only answered
that he had found no one. The old kafir had gone off without a word
to his place among Piet's kafirs, and presently Susanna moved off to
her bed in the wagon. Piet packed Jan and Andries off after her, and
remained smoking by the fire with Klein Piet opposite him.
"Now," said Klein Piet, when they were alone; "what was it you saw?"
Piet took the pipe from his lips and gazed at him across the fire.
"As sure as death," he said, "I saw the pit swarming with men like
birds over a wheatfield. And you?"
"I saw it too," answered Klein Piet. "And the men with the
hammers--they were naked to the waist and hairy like baboons."
They stared at each other stupidly, half-aghast at the knowledge they
shared. Their faces, in the firelight, were white and hard.
"Have we trekked too far?" said Piet, almost in a whisper. "Can a man
trek to hell? God, there are those hammers again."
Clink, Clink! they sounded, pounding away in the night, clear and even
as the ticking of a clock.
"They will have it cut by morning," whispered Klein Piet. "What will
happen then?"
Piet was listening to the sounds, with his pipe poised in front of his
mouth. He shook his head.
"I don't know," he answered. "But we will see. Klein Piet, you and I
will keep the _brand-wacht_ to-night. If anything is to happen, we will
be awake for it."
"Yes, father," answered Klein Piet mechanically, and then the talk
between them dropped. On either side of the fire they sat in long
stages of silence, listening to the hammers plying in the night, their
noise making a rythm above the slow murmur of the water on the beach.
A little wind got up, blowing from the north; it carried the scent
of the seaweed and the damp sand to their nostrils and fanned their
smoldering fire to a clearer glow. Somewhere in the bush a jackal
sobbed like a lost child; the wood ask clicked and rustled as it
burned out and settled down. And through it all, like the dominant of
a harmony, the hammers spoke their unceasing clink and the darkness
stirred like a windy arras.
Perhaps the rythm lulled him somewhat;
perhaps he was but sunk in a deeper thought; but Piet did not notice
his son spring to his feet. Klein Piet shook him from his stupor; he
came back to himself and to the agitated face of the young man leaning
over him.
"The hammers have ceased," he shouted.
Klein Piet gabbled the words with lips that puckered and sagged in an
ague of excitement. The elder man rose forthwith.
"Now we shall see!" he said.
He went down to crawl under one of the wagons into the open, but
remained on his knees under it. Klein Piet, on all fours at his side,
shivered and gulped. Their eyes wrestled with the baffling dark, and
their pulses checked and raced; for something was moving out yonder.
They could see but the loom of a great bulk, a blackness blacker than
the night, something vast and tall--and it moved. As their eyes grew
familiar with the darkness, they could see plainly that it moved; it
seemed to slide slowly. Then, delicate but quite clear, some voice
called and others answered. The sliding bulk took on an outline; it
made a vague tracery against the faint sky as it neared them; each
instant it was plainer to see. Piet, intent, every faculty set like a
cocked pistol, noted a long flank, a tall, window-pierced structure
that sloped. Old pictures and forgotten names fermented in his memory.
"_Allemachtig!_ It's a ship," he cried.
Superbly she passed them, that lost galleon of the young world, slipped
from her age-long anchorage. Her high sides were a-bristle with her
guns; her sails were sheeted and her head was to the east. There was a
great company of men on board of her; on her high poop, rising like a
citadel, a little group of them was black and busy. As she passed down
the beach, she dipped and lifted like a burdened ship in a seaway. It
was then Klein Piet had his moment of madness. Suddenly he screamed
like a girl and began to scramble forward. "Wait for me!" he cried. "I
will go with you. I am a sailor too."
He would have run down towards her, but Piet grasped him and held on.
He struggled and they rolled together on the grass, fighting with one
another. Then Klein Piet ceased as suddenly as he had begun.
"I am better now," he gasped, and Piet let him rise. They stood up
together and gazed seaward. A squall was blowing in from the east,
thick and black, with a gleam of white water under it. Was it a sail
they saw, a ship that heeled to the brisk wind and was screened from
sight by the rain? They crawled back under the wagon as the first
wetness lit on their faces, and sat there together.
"If you tell me you saw a ship," said Piet suddenly, "I will call you a
liar."
"Yes," said Klein Piet. "I must be a liar, for I saw one."
When Oom Piet finished this tale, he was wont to knock out his pipe on
the heel of his boot.
"But in the morning, when we went back to our work," he always added,
"there was the chain--cut through!"
A FOOTPATH MORALITY
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
Along the Hills, height after height
Tosses the dappled light;
Waters unhindered flow;
The cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow;
And young winds nothing can quell
Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,
Again to make
Its thousand faery white pagodas shake.
Up many a lane,
The blue vervain
A coverlid hath featly spread
For the bees' bed,
That those tired sylvan thieves
May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.
To-morrow morn,
Bright agrimony in the thickets born
Will high uphold
Each cinquefoil of plain gold;
Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,
And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,
And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,
On the waste common by some rock
Her lone dark-centred wheel draw in
Long, long ere dusk begin.
This day
Of infinite May
Is far more fitly yours than ours,
O spirit-bodied flowers!
What heart disordered sore
Comes through the greenwood door,
Shall for your sake
Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break:
And hearts beneath no ban
Will in your sight some penance do for man,
Poor lagging man, content to be
Sick with the impact of eternity,
Who might keep step with you in the low grass,
Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!
Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown
To flourish fair, and fall fair, and be strewn
Deep in that Will of God, where blend
The origin of beauty and the end.
TAFT AND LABOR
BY
GEORGE W. ALGER
A labor record considered solely in its utilitarian aspect as a
vote-getting device is not especially important to the general public.
The attitude of a presidential candidate, however, towards the
industrial and social problems of the working people is another matter.
Does he know what they are? Does he see the great economic questions
of labor and capital with eyes blinded by class prejudice or does he
see them with the clear vision of a statesman? Does he intend to play a
man's part in helping to solve them? The answer to these inquiries is
of interest not merely to the capitalists and the workers but to all of
us.
In his judicial career Mr. Taft has rendered some decisions in matters
brought before him as a judge, which are bound to be a subject of
discussion in the coming campaign. One group of these decisions deals
with what may be described as rules of industrial warfare.