knowing when they'd get any. Well, I'd a vatje of Old Dop as high as that-
-," indicating with his hand an object about two feet high, "and the other
fellow wanted to buy it from me. I knew two of that. I said I wanted it
for myself. He offered me this, and he offered me that. At last I said,
'Well, just to oblige you, I give you the vatje and you give me the girl!'
And so he did. Most people wouldn't have fancied a nigger girl who'd had
two nigger children, but I didn't mind; it's all the same to me. And I
tell you she worked. She made a garden, and she and the other girl worked
in it; I tell you I didn't need to buy a sixpence of food for them in six
months, and I used to sell green mealies and pumpkins to all the fellows
about. There weren't many flies on her, I tell you. She picked up English
quicker than I picked up her lingo, and took to wearing a dress and shawl."

The stranger still sat motionless, looking into the fire.

Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. "Well, I
came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch
something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a nigger
man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a word to a
nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as cool as can
be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked her to give
him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn't think
anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging about the
camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and asked me for a
lot of cartridges. She'd never asked me for anything before. I asked her
what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and she said the old nigger
woman who helped carry in water to the garden said she couldn't stay and
help her any more unless she got some cartridges to give her son who was
going up north hunting elephants. The woman got over me to give her the
cartridges because she was going to have a kid, and she said she couldn't