my father, my mother, my uncle--a very old man, older than the Baas"
(pointing to Silas Croft)--"were _bijwoners_ (authorised squatters) on
a place belonging to old Jacob Muller, Baas Frank's father, down in
Lydenburg yonder. It was a bush-veldt farm, and old Jacob used to come
down there with his cattle from the High veldt in the winter when there
was no grass in the High veldt, and with him came the Englishwoman, his
wife, and the young Baas Frank--the Baas we saw yesterday."

"How long was all this ago?" asked Mr. Croft.

Jantje counted on his fingers for some seconds, and then held up his
hand and opened it four times in succession. "So," he said, "twenty
years last winter. Baas Frank was young then, he had only a little down
upon his chin. One year when _Oom_ Jacob went away, after the first
rains, he left six oxen that were too _poor_ (thin) to go, with
my father, and told him to look after them as though they were his
children. But the oxen were bewitched. Three of them took the lung-sick
and died, a lion got one, a snake got one, and one ate 'tulip' and died
too. So when _Oom_ Jacob came back the next year all the oxen were gone.
He was very angry with my father, and beat him with a yoke-strap till he
was all blood, and though we showed him the bones of the oxen, he said
that we had stolen them and sold them.

"Now _Oom_ Jacob had a beautiful span of black oxen that he loved like
children. Sixteen of them there were, and they would come up to the yoke
when he called them and put down their heads of themselves. They were
tame as dogs. These oxen were thin when they came down, but in two
months they grew fat and began to want to trek about as oxen do. At this
time there was a Basutu, one of Sequati's people, resting in our hut,
for he had hurt his foot with a thorn. When _Oom_ Jacob found that the