of him, but from the Hottentot Hans and my father I managed to collect a
good deal of information concerning him and his business.

It appeared that he was the only child of Henri Marais's sister, who
married a Portuguese from Delagoa Bay of the name of Pereira, who had
come to the Cape Colony to trade many years before and settled there.
Both he and his wife were dead, and their son, Hernando, Marie's cousin,
had inherited all their very considerable wealth.

Indeed, now I remembered having heard this Hernando, or Hernan, as the
Boers called him for short, spoken of in past years by the Heer Marais
as the heir to great riches, since his father had made a large fortune
by trading in wine and spirits under some Government monopoly which he
held. Often he had been invited to visit Maraisfontein, but his
parents, who doted on him and lived in one of the settled districts not
far from Cape Town, would never allow him to travel so far from them
into these wild regions.

Since their death, however, things had changed. It appeared that on the
decease of old Pereira the Governor of the Colony had withdrawn the wine
and spirit monopoly, which he said was a job and a scandal, an act that
made Hernando Pereira very angry, although he needed no more money, and
had caused him to throw himself heart and soul into the schemes of the
disaffected Boers. Indeed, he was now engaged as one of the organisers
of the Great Trek which was in contemplation. In fact, it had already
begun, into the partially explored land beyond the borders of the
Colony, where the Dutch farmers proposed to set up dominions of their
own.

That was the story of Hernando Pereira, who was to be--nay, who had