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English father and Portuguese mother, I suppose. But what can an Englishman be doing in a place like this? If it had been a trek-Boer I should not have been surprised." Then I began to give directions about out-spanning. We had just got the oxen out of the yokes, when a big, raw-boned, red-bearded, blue-eyed, roughly-clad man of about fifty years of age appeared from the house, yawning.
But you may judge for yourself, boy reader, after you have heard the "history and adventures" of the "trek-boer" and his family. The ex-field-cornet was seated in front of his kraal for such is the name of a South African homestead. From his lips protruded a large pipe, with its huge bowl of meerschaum. Every boer is a smoker.
A leopard-skin pouch hanging under his right arm, a hunting-knife stuck in his waist-belt, and a large meerschaum pipe through the band of his hat, completed the equipments of the trek-boer, Von Bloom. Hans and Hendrik were very similarly attired, armed, and equipped.
Now while he was preparing to draw his map in the ashes, or afterwards, I forget which, Zikali had told me that when we drew near to the great river we should come to a place on the edge of bush-veld that ran down to the river, where a white man lived, adding, after casting his bones and reading from them, that he thought this white man was a "trek-Boer."
A wild and desolate land it is, but little known except to the occasional nomad "trek-boer," who in the seasons when rain has made it possible wanders from water-hole to water-hole with his scanty flocks and herds; or to the mounted trooper on his long and lonely patrol; or the even more infrequent prospector in his search for the mineral wealth that abounds in the district, but which scarcity of water and cost of transport have so far rendered useless.
Von Bloom escaped by flight; but his fine property in the Graaf Reinet was confiscated and given to another. Many years after we find him living in a remote district beyond the great Orange River, leading the life of a "trek-boer," that is, a nomade farmer, who has no fixed or permanent abode, but moves with his flocks from place to place, wherever good pastures and water may tempt him.
The region around, for hundreds of miles, was uninhabited, for the thinly-scattered, half-human Bushmen who dwelt within its limits, hardly deserved the name of inhabitants any more than the wild beasts that howled around them. I have said that Von Bloom now followed the occupation of a "trek-boer."
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