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I bade her, and the Prinsloos and the Meyers, if they would accompany her, as I was sure they would, move themselves off at once to the farm I had beaconed out thirty miles away from the Bushman's River, under pretence of seeing how the houses that were being built there were getting on.
They started off in the direction of the blazing torch, and ran as fast as they could. They still heard the Bushman's voice, and to their dismay beyond it the screams of little Jan. Of course they could not tell what was causing all this. They only pressed on with fearful apprehensions.
He pointed across the plain, where the heat was dancing, to a little hill. It must have been eight miles away, and from it rose a thin coil of smoke. At first Sax thought it was merely the effect of the sun causing everything in the distance to quiver and take on fantastic shapes, but he trusted the bushman's eyes, and at last convinced himself that it was indeed smoke.
Only a bushman's personal observation, remember, this lifting of the Wet with the full of the Easter moon, not a scientific statement; but by an insight peculiarly their own, bushmen come at more facts than most men.
Poor Wordsworth dropped into the boat fainting from terror, exhaustion, and loss of blood, for, although he was unconscious of it all the time, in his convulsive grip, the sharp oyster-shells had cut his hands to the very bone. A good glass of grog and some hot tea the bushman's infallible remedy soon brought him round, but the scars on his hands and knees will accompany him to his grave.
Reluctantly Pedro went away. Soon he was back with news of a suitable place. He found all bending closer over Yuara, whose breathing had become stertorous and whose eyes seemed fixed. "Going!" was the bushman's thought. But the others would not have it so. "How 'bout a shot o' booze to jolt his heart, Cap?" suggested Tim, whose whole soul was in the fight. McKay nodded.
This then they did secretly, without the knowledge of Retief, but being delayed upon their journey by one accident and another, which he set out in detail, they only reached the Bushman's River too late, after the massacre had taken place.
It was also an apparently unequal conflict they had been drawn into, subtlety pitted against sturdiness, the elusive, foining rapier against the bushman's axe, but there are moments in all struggles when finesse does not avail, and it is by raw, unreasoning valour a man must stand or fall, while at times like these the ponderous blade is the equal of the slender streak of steel.
But they knew at the same time that it was one of the shyest of birds, so shy that it is very difficult to get even a long shot at one. How, then, was it to be approached within range of the Bushman's arrow? That was the point to be considered.
I thought of the many blind musicians in Sydney, and I thought of the bushman's chance, standing at a corner swanking a cheap concertina, and I felt sorry for him.
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