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I passed the fork of the rubbly roads where I had parted from Hilda. At last, I reached the long, rolling ridge which looks down upon Klaas's, and could see in the slant sunlight the mud farmhouse and the corrugated iron roof where the oxen were stabled. The place looked more deserted, more dead-alive than ever. Not a black boy moved in it.
I had now to arrange for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land a portentous matter. Just as I was on the point of leaving Klaas's, and was tightening the saddle-girth on my sturdy little pony, Oom Jan Willem himself sidled up to me with a mysterious air, his broad face all wrinkled with anticipatory pleasure.
Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because she liked Hilda. We spent some months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place, save for Hilda.
I had come back from Salisbury, unknowing it, into the midst of a revolt of bloodthirsty savages. Yet, even if I had known, I must still have hurried home with all speed to Klaas's to protect Hilda. Hilda? Where was Hilda? A breathless sinking crept over me. I staggered out into the open. It was impossible to say what horror might not have happened.
He had teased each one of his sisters to give him her bit of cheese, and this, added to his own slice, made his stomach feel as heavy as lead. Klaas's bed was up in the garret. When the house was first built, one of the red tiles of the roof had been taken out and another one, made of glass, was put in its place. In the morning, this gave the boy light to put on his clothes.
My business detained me several hours in the half-built town, with its flaunting stores and its rough new offices; it was not till towards afternoon that I could get away again on my sorrel, across the blazing plain once more to Klaas's. I moved on over the plateau at an easy trot, full of thoughts of Hilda. What could be the step she expected Sebastian to take next?
Fast and furious Klaas's rifle and my own rang out, and in the dense group of animals the execution was so terrible that in a few minutes the bulk fled back to the farther end, and I ran to where John lay crushed in the arms of the baboon leader. The vile beast had its fangs fixed in his throat when I reached them.
They saluted us, military fashion. "Matabele police, sah," the leader answered, recognising me. "You are flying from Klaas's?" "Yes," I answered. "They have murdered Klaas, with his wife and child. Some of them are now following us." The spokesman was a well-educated Cape Town negro. "All right sah," he answered. "I have forty men here right behind de kopje. Let dem come!
The Matabele, perhaps, had risen in force over the whole vast area which was once Lo-Bengula's country; if so, their first object would certainly be to cut us off from communication with the main body of English settlers at Buluwayo. "I trust to you, Hilda," I said, on the day after the massacre at Klaas's, "to divine for us where these savages are next likely to attack us."
Why, to egg on the natives whose confidence he has somehow gained into making a further attack, and cutting off all Salisbury. If he had succeeded in getting you and me massacred at Klaas's, as he hoped, he would no doubt have slunk off to the coast at once, leaving his black dupes to be shot down at leisure by Rhodes's soldiers." "I see; but having failed in that?"
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