Читать книгу: «The Gold Kloof», страница 5
Chapter V.
THE TREK BEGINS
Karl Engelbrecht gathered himself up after a short pause, but there was no further fight left in him. He turned to go.
"All right, my fine Englishman," he said, shaking his fist at his conqueror. "I don't know who you are or what you are, but no one does Karl Engelbrecht an injury without paying for it. I shall be even with you, and that before very long. Meanwhile I shall go straight to the magistrate's office, and get that scoundrel arrested for running away from my service."
As he spoke he pointed to Poeskop, who was smiling all over his yellow face at his former master's discomfiture.
"And I'll follow you to the magistrate's office directly," said Mr. Blakeney, "and have you summoned for assaulting this native."
Accompanied by the two lads, who were overjoyed, if a little awed, at the result of the contest, Mr. Blakeney went into the hotel to wash his hands and get rid of all traces of the encounter. He himself had scarcely suffered at all. He had a lump on his forehead and a red patch on his cheek-bone, and one of his knuckles was badly cut; beyond these slight injuries he has untouched.
"My word, uncle," said Guy, as Mr. Blakeney took his coat off and poured out some water, "you did punish that ruffian. I had no idea you were such a fighting man. It was splendid!"
"Well, boys," returned Mr. Blakeney, "I don't like fighting, and I have always made it a point to avoid a scuffle if it can possibly be done. But sometimes there comes an occasion when a man must take his own part. This was one of them. I couldn't stand by and see that hulking bully knocking Poeskop about. My idea is that every decent Englishman, or English boy, should be able to defend himself when compelled to, and for that reason I believe in every lad being taught to box. My old boxing lessons stood me in good stead just now. I suppose the Boer was at least a couple of stone heavier than myself; but he knew no more about fighting than a baby, and he paid the penalty."
He soused his face in cold water, washed his hands, and with the two lads and Poeskop went off to the magistrate's office. The upshot of the affair was that Karl Engelbrecht was proved to be entirely in the wrong. It was shown that he had persistently maltreated Poeskop, and that he had seldom if ever paid him his rightful wages. Other natives in the town, who were under Portuguese rule, but who had served with Engelbrecht, could speak to these facts. In the end the Boer was fined for assaulting the Bushman, and ordered to pay him a further sum of money due for unpaid wages. The Dutchman paid the money with a wry face, and it was clear that he was yet more inflamed with hatred against Poeskop and his English supporters than he had been before.
But for the most part the people of Mossamedes, including the governor of the town and other officials, were delighted at the punishment inflicted on the big Boer. He was known and feared as a quarrelsome bully, and now some one had been found to check his blustering career and cut his comb. Mr. Blakeney was advised privately, after these occurrences, to keep his eyes open. Karl Engelbrecht was a man of evil reputation, who would not be likely to stop at trifles in the achievement of revenge, and revenge he was known to have vowed. In the town nothing would be attempted, but in the veldt such a ruffian might very well try to do mischief. However, Mr. Blakeney treated the matter very coolly. He was well able to take care of himself, he said; and having wide experience of the veldt and veldt ways, he felt perfectly competent to set at naught the blusterings of Karl Engelbrecht and his followers. The big Dutchman, having got over the effects of the fight, was having a good time in Mossamedes. For some time past the Portuguese Government had been employing the Trek Boers settled in their territory as mercenaries in their warfare against any tribes that happened to give trouble. The Boers took their payment chiefly in cattle, raided from the defeated tribesfolk; and Engelbrecht, who had been lately leading a commando against some unfortunate natives, had returned with much plunder in oxen and goats. These he had sold for good prices; his pockets were full of money, and he and his freebooting associates were bent on having a high time at the various bars and canteens of the place.
It is perhaps necessary to explain here, in a few words, how it came about that Boers were thus to be found in Portuguese territory, so far away from the homes of the South African Dutch stock settled in the Transvaal. Nearly twenty years before, many families of Boers, disgusted with the anarchy and bad government of the Transvaal Republic, and embittered yet more at the English taking over the country, as they had done in 1877, had quitted the Transvaal and trekked north-westward across the desert in search of a new Promised Land, which they believed to exist somewhere in the far interior. These ignorant and misguided folk found in their long wanderings no land of Canaan, flowing, as they had fondly hoped, with milk and honey. Their trek extended over several years; they endured almost unexampled privations and troubles from thirst, fevers, and the attacks of natives; scores of them died; they lost the greater portion of their stock, and abandoned many wagons; some turned back, and only a comparatively small remnant emerged from the perils of this unparalleled trek. After wandering about the western regions of the Kalahari, the Okavango country, and Ovampoland, they crossed the Cunene River and entered Portuguese territory.
Here they were well treated. They were allotted farms and encouraged to colonize the country, and many families did actually settle down at Humpata. Since that time-about the beginning of 1881-these Trek Boers and their descendants had accepted their lot in the new country and become Portuguese subjects. They tilled the ground, ranched cattle, sheep, and goats, rode transport (that is, carried goods) to and from Mossamedes and Benguela, hunted elephants for their ivory, and other kinds of game for their skins and flesh. Latterly, as we have seen, they had been assisting the Portuguese in native wars. For this kind of warfare they were excellently well adapted, being good shots and riders, and well versed in every trick and circumstance of veldt fighting. The Portuguese had, in fact, found them highly satisfactory auxiliaries, and the unfortunate natives-too often treated with the grossest unfairness and trickery by all parties-terrible enemies.
Among the Trek Boers of Humpata and the neighbouring country were many decent, deserving, and well-conducted people, who were only anxious to make a fair and honest living out of the country. A leaven of them, however, were mere filibusters and adventurers, cruel, cunning, and deceitful, ready to overreach and rob any man, especially if he had a black skin, and always prepared to use their rifles on small provocation. Among these was to be reckoned Karl Engelbrecht, who, even among these lawless spirits, had acquired a sinister reputation. Most of these Dutch settlers were fine, big, upstanding men, strong, bold, hardy, and athletic-as indeed they might well be; for they and their families represented the survival of the fittest, after one of the most trying and adventurous passages on record. Their seven years of wandering had, in truth, weeded out all the weak ones, and left alive only the toughest and hardiest of a tough and hardy race.
For the next few days Mr. Blakeney and his party were busied in pushing on their preparations for the trek. They filled the lower part of the wagon with various stores and provisions-meal, coffee, sugar, tinned provisions, jams, vegetables, and other small luxuries. They laid in also dried onions, always useful on an expedition of this kind, where green vegetables are unprocurable, as well as a bag or two of potatoes. They carried also sacks of mealies and Kaffir corn (the latter a kind of millet) with which to feed the horses. They anticipated a good deal of hunting; and you cannot pursue game on horseback, and run down giraffe, eland, and other fleet creatures, unless your nags are well fed and in good condition. This fact Guy had already become aware of during his stay in British Bechuanaland. Their saddlery, ammunition, guns and rifles had come round with them from Cape Town. Juno, their invaluable pointer, was also of the party. Juno seemed to be getting keener and keener as each day passed; she watched anxiously the loading of the wagon, and was evidently only too desirous to have the whole party out in the veldt. A good light tent had been procured, and Mr. Blakeney's kartel fixed up in the wagon. All was now ready for the trek, which they hoped to begin next day.
During these preparations they necessarily, moving as they did freely about the small seaport of Mossamedes, passed Karl Engelbrecht and his boon companions in close proximity. After his severe lesson the Boer, who was a coward at bottom, did not dare to attempt any further liberties with the Englishmen or their servants; but he scowled evilly as he passed, and had always some savage remark to make to his friends-delivered carefully in an undertone-as they went by. Mr. Blakeney and the two lads, for their part, took not the slightest notice of the freebooters; even Poeskop, strong in his reliance upon his English protectors, held his head well in the air, and assumed an air of supercilious indifference, which perhaps in his secret heart he felt was not altogether justified. For Poeskop, undoubtedly, knowing his former master and his evil ways so well, still retained within his soul certain secret quakings as he thought of or set eyes upon Karl Engelbrecht.
"My young baas," he would say to Guy, as they sighted the big, burly ruffian, "he is slim, and he is strong, and he is cruel. And he will try to make us suffer for his black eyes, which he still carries, the schelm! and his bleeding nose. Maghte! but it was good as a sackful of honey1 to see Karl Engelbrecht floored by Baas Blackenny" (he always mispronounced the word), "and it does me good still to see his battered face."
Then he would croon to himself in his croaking voice: "But we shall suffer, we shall suffer; Karl Engelbrecht is planning something; Poeskop knows it, ay, he knows it. Well, Poeskop will look out. He sleep always like the muishond [a kind of weasel], with one eye open."
On the last night before the trek Mr. Blakeney was with the two lads in their bedroom, having a chat with them, and helping them to complete their packings. They talked on many subjects, including the treasure hunt which lay before them. Then they bade one another good night, and Mr. Blakeney retired to his own room.
Next morning early Guy knocked at his door and aroused him. Guy was always the early bird of the party: earlier even than his uncle, who was always out and about before six.
"Uncle," he said, "I want you to come and look at something in our room."
"All right, Guy," was the reply. "What is it?"
"Something rather odd, I think," returned Guy, as they went down the passage. They entered the double-bedded room where the cousins slept, and Guy took his uncle across to the wall against which Guy's bed stood.
"Look at this, uncle," he said, kneeling on his bed and pointing to the wall. "What do you make of it?"
The wall was in fact nothing more than a fairly stout partition of varnished wood. Mr. Blakeney knelt beside Guy, and looked closely at the spot where the lad's finger rested. He saw at once that a neat hole had been bored through the partition from the other side, and a hollow left big enough to thrust the point of his little finger into.
"Well, what do you think it means, Guy?" he asked, screwing up his mouth with an odd expression.
"I think, uncle, it means," returned Guy, "that that fellow in the next room has been spying on us for some reason or other."
"Who has the next room?" queried Mr. Blakeney, manifestly with some anxiety.
"Why, that Portuguese brute who is always about with Karl Engelbrecht-Minho, his name is."
"Whew!" whistled Mr. Blakeney. "I wish I had known this earlier. What time does he leave his room?"
"Not for another hour yet," broke in Tom; "and he always locks his door and takes his key with him."
"Well, Tom," said his father, "you stay behind while Guy and I go out to the wagons and start the trek. Then we'll come back to breakfast, and afterwards ride out together and overtake the wagons by the mid-day outspan. Meanwhile if, by hook or crook, you can get into this fellow Minho's room, and see what this hole means, do so. Be careful, though, and don't get into any unpleasantness with the man. If you can't get in without trouble, leave it alone. I'll see the landlord about it."
They returned in an hour and a half's time, and were met by Tom with a smiling face.
"I've done the Sherlock Holmes business," he said quietly. "Minho went out and locked his door. I tried his window, which like ours opens on to the veranda, and found that the artful beggar had fastened it in such a way that, while the top sash is open, you can't pull up the lower part. It was impossible to climb in through the top without running the risk of breaking the glass. Well, I waited impatiently half an hour, and then Maria-the native woman who cleans the rooms up, and has evidently a second key-went in and did up the room. While she was gone with a bundle of clothes for the wash I nipped in, and had a good look round at the partition on that side. I found that a hole had been neatly bored with an auger, and the cavity filled up with a round piece of wood, which had been painted to look just like a knot in the pinewood. This, with a little coaxing of the finger nail, comes out, and then you have a view into our room, and I have no doubt can hear quite well everything that is said in here. I put the bit of wood back, and slipped out again before old Maria had got back from her errand."
"The brute!" ejaculated Mr. Blakeney. "He has evidently been spying on us. And when he bored that hole he must have got into this room and cleared away any traces of his work." He knelt on Guy's bed and examined the aperture carefully again. "He has even taken the trouble to put on some dark paint round this side of the hole," he added, "so that the place looks just like a pine knot from this side. I wonder you spotted it, Guy."
"Well, I noticed it from the bed this morning," said Guy, "just before I got up. It was a mere chance. The place looked uneven, and when I examined it I found I could just get the tip of my little finger inside the hole. Then I saw that the place wasn't natural."
"Well, the mischief's done now," said Mr. Blakeney. "I have half a mind to tell the landlord-in fact, I think I will straight away."
Senhor José Moseles, whom Mr. Blakeney at once interviewed, was no friend of Antonio Minho. He knew the man to be a shady character, and a friend of the filibustering Boer, Engelbrecht. But in Mossamedes such characters were not uncommon, and landlords had to put up with them, if they paid their bills. Minho was just now flush of money, and indeed was usually well supplied with that commodity. But Senhor Moseles would look after him. It was not Mr. Blakeney's plan to arouse the man's suspicions just then. Moseles therefore arranged to take measures concerning the peep-hole a week or two later; which, Minho having left the hotel, he did. The hole was plugged and varnished, and the matter, so far as he was concerned, ended.
This little matter attended to, the three Englishmen breakfasted. Then, having put together their small kits, their horses were brought round, and they quitted Mossamedes. Their route lay along the main road running from the seaport to Humpata, and there was no difficulty in finding their way. The road, if road it could be called, was rough and uneven, and the country parched, hilly, and uninteresting. They overtook the wagon at one o'clock, and found it outspanned till the heat of the day was past. At four they trekked, and made fair progress till nine, when they outspanned again. For nearly a week the expedition pushed on steadily eastward, through sterile and mountainous country, until they had reached the Trek Boer settlement at Humpata, by the Portuguese sometimes called San Januario. Here they halted for a couple of days to rest the oxen and take in some further stores, including poultry, meal, and other produce grown by the Boers in this neighbourhood.
The Dutch people of this curious little settlement, so remote from the Transvaal, whence they had trekked years before, interested Mr. Blakeney and the boys not a little. They knew the pathetic history of these people: of their long wanderings, and of the terrible sufferings they had sustained before attaining this region. They found them, as a rule, kindly and hospitable folk, if rough and primitive. So soon as the Trek Boers discovered that the newcomers spoke Cape Dutch, and came from Bechuanaland, so near to the Transvaal border, they were only too anxious to render them hospitality, and make inquiries about the country they themselves had quitted years before. The English travellers, on their part, had many little returns to make for such kindnesses as were thus shown them. They had Cape and Transvaal papers to give away; a spare bag of excellent coffee to exchange; and they won the hearts of several families by the gift of tins of Morton's jams, marmalade, and ginger, which to the sweet-toothed Dutch, who seldom met with such rare luxuries, were as manna in the desert.
"Alle wereld!" said Mevrouw Van der Merwe, a stout, good-natured old Boer dame, living in one of the best houses in the little settlement. "'Tis a pleasure to set eyes on fresh-looking folk again from South Africa, with news of the Transvaal, and the Free State, and the Old Colony. One gets tired of seeing nothing but these little yellow-faced Portuguese, who to my mind are, after all, no better than Griquas and Bastards. I always say to our people here, 'There are English and English, just as there are Boers and Boers. You get good and bad of every race of mankind.' For my part, I have met many good English, and have received many kindnesses from them, just as I have from you, Menheer Blakeney, and your son and nephew. And so they are getting more gold than ever out of the Transvaal?"
"Yes," answered Mr. Blakeney. "They are getting enormous quantities-something like thirteen millions of pounds sterling during the year."
"Is it possible!" ejaculated the vrouw, pushing the tobacco canister over to Mr. Blakeney, and pouring him out another cup of coffee. "Ah, well! I always say that gold will be the ruin of the Dutch in the Transvaal; and Paul Kruger is a great fool to allow so much mining. If I were president I would close down every gold mine, and let the country be used only for farming. The Heer Gott never meant people to dig and claw into the bowels of the earth after gold, like a lot of greedy baboons after ground nuts. But I knew Paul Kruger well in the old days. He was a greedy fellow always; greedy for power, greedy for money. I hear he is rich as a Jew man, and spends £400 a year in coffee money, for which the burghers pay him-entertaining a pack of useless folk that come flattering and fawning about him. But it will be his downfall. I know it, I know it. I always told him so. Love of money, love of power. He had better have stuck to his farming, as his old father did before him.
"Your Jameson raid," she went on, "is a bad sign. It means that Paul Kruger is successful a second time. But you English can never forgive that or Majuba; and there will be a big row some day, and then Oom Paul will have to go, and we Transvaalers shall lose our country. I know it, and my husband knows it, though every one else here declares that the Boers can always beat the English. But, you see, I remember as a girl Zwart Kopjes and Boomplaats, when your folk beat ours; and I say that you have more men than we, and your turn will come some day."
"Well," rejoined Mr. Blakeney, after the old lady had finished her tirade, "your people are very warlike now. I'm sorry the raid happened. It was an idiotic business, and has done a good deal of mischief. I don't like the feeling that is rising between the two races in South Africa. I fear, with you, that it will come to a big fight some day; and when it does, the English will never rest till they have made all South Africa theirs. The Free State Boers say openly now that they will take part with the Transvaal if a struggle comes; and the gold-mining folk at Johannesburg, and Rhodes and the rest of them, are bent on forcing on a war, which I am afraid now will have to come."
"Yes," said the old lady. "It's just like a couple of boys who have bad blood between them. They will go on growling and being unpleasant to one another, and then all at once the fight begins and the blood flows. Still even that is better than perpetual miscalling and swearing at one another, for all the world like a pair of tom-cats. Better, I say, have the fight over and have done with it."
They spent two very pleasant days at Humpata, and then trekked. Before they left, Mevrouw Van der Merwe sent for Guy and Tom, and presented them with a quantity of dried fruits, peaches, quinces, and apricots. She added some of her precious apricot komfit, by which the Boers set much store. She had taken a great fancy to the two lads; they reminded her, she said, of two of her own sons, whom she had lost of fever at Debra and Vogel Pan on the trek thither. Guy and his cousin were perhaps not greatly flattered at being compared to Boer boys, for whom they cherished, like most English lads, a secret disdain. But the old lady was very kind, and they thanked her heartily for her gifts. They left her sawing through a big koodoo marrow bone with a hand saw. Her husband had lately come in from the veldt, and had brought her a quantity of biltong (dried flesh) and this dainty, of which she was inordinately fond.
"Farewell," she said again, pausing from her task and puffing hard for breath. "And, Tom, mind and tell your father once more to be on the lookout for Karl Engelbrecht. I am sorry they have had blows-though Karl was well served out, and your father was a right stark fellow to give him a thrashing. But Karl is a bitter bad enemy, and he will not forget. Be on the lookout, all of you, and if he comes troubling you" – here she lowered her voice to a tragic whisper-"don't be afraid to shoot! Tell your father that, and say that is my last word-Karl is a schepsel and a dangerous foe. Farewell."
The various trophies lying about the Boer settlement and in the primitive habitations had greatly fired the ambition of the two cousins, who were now longing to reach the game veldt and begin shooting. At Humpata there had been indications of many kinds of wild animal: horns of buffalo, koodoo, roan antelope, water-buck, eland, and many other antelopes; and the hides of lions, giraffes, hippos, and other heavy game were abundant. Here, too, were tusks of elephant and hippopotamus, and the formidable horns of the black rhinoceros. It was manifest that they were on the outskirts of a wonderful game country. As the lads approached each day nearer to this land of wonder and of bliss, their spirits became more and more high, their suppressed excitement more uncontrollable. For three weeks Poeskop guided the expedition steadily towards the north-east. Then, one evening, as they sat round the camp fire, he came up to the group.
"Baas," he said, pointing to the grim range of mountains which towered in front of them in massy outline, dim beneath the starlit sky, "to-morrow we shall pass the berg. Beyond is the game country, and the young baases will then have shooting to their hearts' content."
Already the lads had shot some few head of game, reedbuck and impala and springbuck. They had heard the roar of lions and seen the spoor of buffalo. Their hearts leapt within them at Poeskop's news. That night their dreams were chiefly of glorious adventures, in which elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and lions played, with themselves, the leading parts.
