half a crown.

"No, Baas," he said with a curious grin, "that is how I reckon. If
anybody beats Jantje, Jantje cuts a notch upon the stick, and every
night before he goes to sleep he looks at it and says, 'One day you will
strike that man twice who struck you once,' and so on, Baas. Look, what
a line of them there are, Baas. One day I shall pay them all back again,
Baas Frank."

Muller abruptly dropped the stick, and followed John towards the house.
It was a much better building than the Boers generally indulge in, and
the sitting-room, though innocent of flooring--unless clay and cowdung
mixed can be called a floor--was more or less covered with mats made of
springbuck skins. In the centre of the room stood a table made of
the pretty _buckenhout_ wood, which has the appearance of having been
industriously pricked all over with a darning-needle, and round it were
chairs and couches of stinkwood, and seated with rimpis or strips of
hide.

In one big chair at the end of the room, busily employed in doing
nothing, sat _Tanta_ (Aunt) Coetzee, the wife of Old Hans, a large and
weighty woman, who evidently had once been rather handsome; and on
the couches were some half-dozen Boers, their rifles in their hands or
between their knees.

It struck John as he entered that some of these did not seem best
pleased to see him, and he thought he heard one young fellow, with
a hang-dog expression of face, mutter something about the "damned
Englishman" to his neighbour rather more loudly than was necessary to
convey his sentiments. However, old Coetzee came forward to greet him