CHAPTER THREE


According to one's individual point of view, Cape Town, on that New
Year morning of nineteen hundred and one, was either a point of
departure for the front, or a city of refuge for the sleek and
portly Uitlanders who thronged the hotels and made too audible
mourning for their imperiled possessions. Viewed in either light, it
was hot, crowded and unclean. From his caricature of a hansom,
Weldon registered his swift impression that he wished to get off to
the front as speedily as possible. The hansom contributed to this
impression no less than did the city. Out of a multitude of similar
vehicles, he had chosen this for its name, painted across its
curving front. The Lady of the Snows had obviously been christened
as a welcome to the scores of his fellow colonials who had gone that
way before; and he and Carew had dashed past Killarney and The
Scotch Thistle, to take possession of its padded interior.

It was almost noon, as they drove through the Dock Gates, past the
Amsterdam Battery, and turned eastward towards Adderley Street and
the Grand Hotel. It was nightfall before their luggage was safe
through the custom house and in their room. Carew eyed his boxes
askance. Weldon attacked the straps of his nearest trunk.

"Wherefore?" Carew queried languidly from the midst of a haze of
smoke.

"To take account of stock."