ough a drift."

They looked out. The road sloped steeply down to the edge of a small
river which swept purling between reed-fringed banks. The foremost oxen
were already in the water. There was a little extra yelling and
whip-cracking, and the great vehicle rolled ponderously through, and
began toilsomely to mount the steep ascent on the other side. Gerard's
glance looked longingly at the water.

"Better wait till we outspan," said Dawes, reading this. "We can't stop
now, and by the time you overtook us you'd be so fagged and hot you'd
get no good at all out of your swim."

The sun was hardly an hour high, and already it was more than warm. The
sky was an unbroken and dazzling blue, and on every side lay the roll of
the open _veldt_ in a shimmer of heat, with here and there a farmhouse
standing amid a cluster of blue gum-trees. The road seemed to be making
a gradual ascent. Our two friends felt little inclined for walking now,
for the beat of the morning, combined with short allowance of sleep
during the past two nights, was beginning to tell.

"Jump up here, now," said Dawes, flinging a couple of rugs on top of the
load of goods. "Sun or no sun, you'll be better off than in the tent.
Canvas, with the sun on it, is almost as baking as corrugated iron.
Hold hard. Wait till she stops," he warned, having given orders to that
effect. "Old stagers, like me, can jump on and off while trekking
along, but you'd get under the wheels--sure--and then what'd Kingsland
say?"

"You see," he went on, when they were safely and comfortably on their
perch, "in getting up and down by the disselboom you have to be fairly
smart. You just get inside the fore wheel and walk along with the
machine, and jump quietly up. Getting down's the worst, because, if you
hit the disselboom or slip on it, ten to one you get shot off bang in
front of the wheel, and then nothing on earth'll save you, for you can't
stop one of these waggons under fifty yards, sometimes not even then."

"By Jove! Do many fellows come to grief that way?" asked Gerard.

"Heaps. You can hardly take up a paper anywhere without seeing a
paragraph headed `The Disselboom again.' But generally it's when
fellows are rather full up--taken a drop too much--you understand. Not
always, of course. And when you think of the weight these waggons
carry--this one's loaded close on eleven thousand pounds, now--No,
you've no show at all."

Then at the morning's outspan