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After lunch, Claude took out a handful of good cigars he had bought at the drugstore. Ernest, who couldn't afford cigars, was pleased. He lit one, and as he smoked he kept looking at it with an air of pride and turning it around between his fingers. The horses stood with their heads over the wagon-box, munching their oats.
Far from it. Later he removed his boots, stuffed them full of hay, and hunkered down behind a dismounted wagon-seat over which a wagon-cover had been flung. With a short length of rope and several handfuls of hay he propped the boots in such a position that they stuck out beyond the wagon-box ten or twelve inches and gave every evidence of human occupation.
"'Piet, she said. "'Annie, my heart, said I. "'My little baby that died yesterday has been here, and it stood over the wagon-box, she said. "'What did it say? I asked. "'It said that if I died you must marry a fat woman. "'I will, I said, and I went to sleep again. Presently she woke me.
At any rate, the next evening when we drove into Blissfield, Michigan, I determined that it should be a success, although I dreaded the opening of my first sale. After supper we seated our musicians at the rear end of the wagon-box and started on our parade around town. Loud singing and the sweet strains of music routed every body in town.
The echoes of the report crashed back to the rocks, but brought nothing from the silence of the emigrant wagon. A second shot followed, tearing through the side board of the wagon-box itself; yet there was no answer.
"Yes, it is Mameena, and I am very pleased that you should remember my voice, Macumazahn, after we have been separated for such a long, long time," and, with a sudden movement, she threw back the kaross, hood and all, revealing herself in all her strange beauty. I jumped down off the wagon-box and took her hand.
Knowing that the boy's mother was in the "schooner," on a sick bed, I left my wagon and ran to that. As the oxen, in trying to shield themselves from the hail, were forcing the front wheels around under the wagon-box, I was fortunate enough to get a shoulder under one corner of the box and exert sufficient force to prevent the wagon upsetting. All this took little more than a minute.
"Wal, nothin' 's ever happened t' 'em before," declared Lancaster. But he whistled to stay a change in good fortune, and rapped the wood of the wagon-box with his bare knuckles. David Bond busied himself with urging on his horse. "God will watch over them," he said devoutly. "'Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep." The section-boss sniffed.
Some of them keep on flying after they've been shot clean through the body, going straight on for a couple of hundred feet, or even more, and then dropping like a stone. How hard-hearted we soon get! It used to worry me. Now I gather 'em up as though they were so many chips and toss them into the wagon-box; or into my school-bag, if it's a private expedition of only Paddy and me.
Apparently Mameena continued to be the recipient of information which she found it necessary to communicate in private to the prince. At any rate, on sundry subsequent evenings the dullness of my vigil on the wagon-box was relieved by the sight of her graceful figure gliding home from the kloof that Umbelazi seemed to find a very suitable spot for reflection after sunset.
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