Lee recognised the locality as he advanced, step by step, down a declivity intersected with blocks of granite and tufts of scrub, or low bush; the murmur of a rivulet making its way over the stones was audible, and the distant cry of the jackal hailed the coming of the night. Here Lee remembered well to have rested on shooting excursions in former days; here he had listened to many a tale of Tanner’s, and he could guess the exact spot for which they were bound—the three men in advance, the Kafir girls in Indian file following. So they proceeded, till the darkness of the glen deepened, and putting aside a large alder, they bent their heads, and found themselves beneath a magnificent oak-tree, to a branch of which was fastened a large ox, black as Erebus.
Motionless and patient he stood with his heavy load upon his broad back, for Brennard had intended returning to the spot sooner than circumstances eventually permitted him, and he bent his head in loving recognition of Amayeka, whose sweet voice welcomed her favourite. The unusual roughness of the weather had detained Brennard longer on his expedition than usual, and Amayeka and her companions had kept their watch day by day in the hills.
I know not a more perfect model of obedience and endurance than a Kafir woman. With the white man, she is never thoroughly tamed. You may take her under your care in childhood—you may accustom her to English habits, dress, and religion; but once let her taste of freedom, and she is like a bird on the wing again. True, however, to the instincts of her nature, she bows to the thraldom of her race, wields the pickaxe and the hoe, submits cheerfully to her occupation of “hewer of wood and drawer of water,” yields obedience to her task-masters, abjures her European costume, albeit she delights in a broidery of many-coloured beads, and sits meekly silent when bartered for by a lover, who, as a husband, makes her one of many slaves.
Such was Amayeka, who had been reared from the age of six years at a missionary station, near the Caledon river; but from this she had been withdrawn by her father Doda when she was fourteen, and during the year—for she was now but fifteen, the prime of a Kafir maiden’s life—she had thrown off her European habits in every sense, retaining only the language, which she spoke with the grace so peculiar to her nation when educated.
I specify her age from general calculation; her father could only count her years by connecting her birth with a period of great drought.
She and her companions, all older than herself, had been sent by Umlala, a petty chief, to convoy the treasonable stores brought from the colony in Brennard’s wagon, and transferred to Zwartz’s back, at a secret station on the banks of Somerset River. This done, a sagacious old Kafir had led Zwartz through an intricate defile to Witches’ Krantz, and fastening him to the “trysting tree,” returned as herdsman to the trading wagon, with its span of draught-oxen, on the banks of Somerset River. For days these poor girls of Kafirland had sat watching the changes of the atmosphere from the mountain slopes. Their food was parched corn and strips of biltongue (meat dried in the sun), supplied by a cleft in the rock, where they had long ago established a simple larder. Apples, from the banks of the Kei and the Gonube rivers, varied their repast occasionally, and a large light basket of sour milk, brought to them from a distant kraal, was a delicious addition. They were very merry; they laughed, they sang, sometimes hymns, taught them by Amayeka; they danced, ate their frugal meals, and slept soundly, pillowed on flowery turf, with heaven’s own canopy of blue and gold above them. If the clouds rose, they withdrew to the caves in the mountain-side, and these recesses were their shelter, when a scout come to tell them that Jocqueenis’ Fingoes were on a march into Dushani’s country, to “eat up” the son of Ixexa. For, however quiet and unpeopled the hills of Kafirland may appear, there are always scouts on the look-out. These tribes carry out the prophecy against the sons of Ishmael, “their hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against them,” hence they are ever on the watch. But all this time our adventurous group are waiting together in the glen. Here Brennard unslung his haversack from Zwartz’s yoke, taking out of it such articles of raiment as he chose to retain for his own use, bestowed it, with some acceptable gear, on the convicts. The flask of Cape brandy was added to the stores, and to each was given a small double-barrelled pistol. Thus partially provided for, the three bade each other farewell, for it was necessary to make as much way as they could before morning, and the defile being threaded, some hours of repose might be obtained in a place of security, to which their female guides would direct them.
Brennard, having watched the party as far as the rays of the moon flickering through the tracery of the trees permitted, returned to his domicile, there to accomplish such repairs as he could single-handed; and this done, to return to Somerset River for his wagon, and forward information to the authorities of the delinquency of the Fingo marauders; but long before the trader had noted the outrage on paper, the warriors had stalked through the enemy’s kraal, and possessed themselves of the cattle they called theirs, and crossing a stream about nine miles to the north, soon chanted their song of triumph and defiance from their own territory.
As the reader will readily infer, the compact to which I have alluded involved a treaty of partnership between Brennard, Lee, and Gray, in the secret traffic of arms and ammunition with the tribes to the north-east of the Cape colony. The deputies left by Brennard near the coast held a situation of little danger, since there was no legal restriction on the sale of arms; nevertheless, a certain caution was necessarily observed in the transmission of such stores from Cape Town, lest the eyes of the authorities should be opened to a fact, at present only suspected by the non-commercial settlers. The powder traffic, demanding greater care and secrecy, was not so easily carried on, and it had long been obvious to Brennard that it would be highly advantageous to establish an intermediate agent between the Gonube and the Witches’ Krantz, for the disposal of the gunpowder, and the surer interchange of Kafir goods in return.
This offer Lee readily accepted, with a reservation that, if it suited his purpose hereafter, he should proceed to the locations lately established to the eastward by the disaffected Dutch. As to Gray, a spell seemed to bind him to such measures as Lee chose to propose.
I have shown that Lee had given Brennard only such details of his early acquaintance with Tanner as he thought necessary, and the trader, as he climbed the hill again, wondered, within himself, at the mysterious influence which had thus suddenly been imposed upon him. Who Lee was, or what his position had been in Southern Africa in former days, he could not tell. All he knew was, that he was a runaway convict, that he had been acquainted with Tanner, and that he had a thorough knowledge of that part of the country, and of all the secret nooks for keeping contraband stores.
Brennard also felt quite certain that Lee would not have admitted his real condition as a runaway convict of the wreck of the Trafalgar, had it not been an event of publicity which would elicit close inquiries; and as there would, probably, be some survivors who had witnessed Lee’s escape in the boat, it would at least be conjectured that he had reached terra firma and made his way into the interior, where he might become a dangerous assistant to the Dutch, who were known to welcome such desperadoes to their gloomy councils. In a word, Lee knew himself to be a marked man, and, in such an exigency, there was nothing like binding a useful coadjutor, like Brennard, by ties which, if broken by one, must be the ruin of both.
When in the cave, after his preservation from shipwreck, Lee had shaped out a somewhat crude plan for the future; he certainly entertained a vision of self-aggrandisement, of leadership among the malcontent Boers, of founding a settlement, and opening a career of rule; but a new incentive to be “up and doing” presented itself unexpectedly before him, and a fresh impetus was at once given to his desires of organising a party among a people ripe for rebellion, by the perusal of a paragraph in