promised better things than colleging at Edinburgh, and I was
as keen to get up country now as I had been loth to leave
England. My mind being full of mysteries, I scanned every
Portuguese loafer on the quay as if he had been a spy, and
when Tam and I had had a bottle of Collates in a cafe I felt
that at last I had got to foreign parts and a new world.

Tam took me to supper with a friend of his, a Scot by the
name of Aitken, who was landing-agent for some big mining
house on the Rand. He hailed from Fife and gave me a hearty
welcome, for he had heard my father preach in his young days.
Aitken was a strong, broad-shouldered fellow who had been a
sergeant in the Gordons, and during the war he had done
secret-service work in Delagoa. He had hunted, too, and traded
up and down Mozambique, and knew every dialect of the
Kaffirs. He asked me where I was bound for, and when I told
him there was the same look in his eyes as I had seen with the
Durban manager.

'You're going to a rum place, Mr Crawfurd,' he said.

'So I'm told. Do you know anything about it? You're not
the first who has looked queer when I've spoken the name.'

'I've never been there,' he said, 'though I've been pretty
near it from the Portuguese side. That's the funny thing about
Blaauwildebeestefontein. Everybody has heard of it, and
nobody knows it.'

'I wish you would tell me what you have heard.'