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Then he went into the bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver. Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to the man in the Taal, with which he was perfectly familiar: "Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected." Smoots Beste growled in his throat: "He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay, that is all.
There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that and where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?" Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the Englishman had gone to Hell. Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and pushed it across the counter.
But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of the oxen and the high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas tilted waggon that had cost such a good round sum. There was a big rainfall on the third day.
Then the following brief dialogue took place: "You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to the decidedly nervous Smoots, "to fetch down a Deputy Civil Commissioner to deal with the effects of a dead English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote this letter that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and called the Free State Hotel?" Smoots nodded heavily.
He ended with an irrepressible outburst of honest indignation: "Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't know you were stealing that span and waggon?" And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he decided in his heavy mind that he would be missing long before the convoy got to Gueldersdorp. Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before.
How did he, Smoots Beste, know whether a minister of the Church of England, or even a Dutch predikant, was to be found at the place beyond? All he hoped for was that he would be able to buy there tobacco and brandy cheap, and sleep drunken, to wake and drink again. The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof.
Oh, that shocking thing, polygamy! How the husbands of the land rise up to defend their firesides from it! No Smoots shall get into our Senate. That virtuous Senate! Why if every practising polygamist went home from the Congress there would not be a quorum left to do business. Monogamy! Why it is the most shocking phase of the hypocrisy due to marriage.
They will never let honest men suffer for behaving square, sure no, they'll not do that!" But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair dealing of the lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt. "Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers are duyvels as well as rogues," said Smoots Beste, with a dull flash of originality.
"Are they not?" Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said in a much more docile tone: "What do you want me to do?" Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially: "Just this, friend.
But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paradise, lying grunting on a bench in the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to the kraals with the Cape boys. The English officer looked at the rowdy landlord and the loafing men about the tavern, and made up his mind. No hands other than his own should prepare a last bed for her, his dearest.
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