n burial. He came forth from the waggon and held parley with
the landlord of the tavern. There was a wire-fenced patch of sandy red
earth a hundred yards from the house, a patch wherein the white woman who
was mistress at the tavern had tried to grow a few common English
flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered packet left by a drummer who had
passed that way. She had grown tired of the trouble of watering and
tending them, so that some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had
flown over the fence and scratched the rest up.

That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price, paid down in good
English sovereigns--the coinage that is welcome in every corner of the
earth, save among the scattered islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, where
gin, tobacco, and coffee are more willingly taken in exchange for goods or
souls.

The Englishman was business-like. He fetched pen and ink and paper out of
that jealously closed-up waggon, drew up the deed of sale, and had it
witnessed by the Boer driver and the white woman at the hotel.

He had made up his mind. He would bury her, since it must be, and then
fetch the clergyman. Knowing him on the road, or returning to the
fulfilment of his promise, she would not mind lying there unblessed and
waiting for six lonely days and nights. He whispered in her deaf ears how
it was going to be, and that she could not doubt him. He swore--not
dreaming how soon he should keep one vow--to visit the grave often, often,
with his child and hers, and to lie there beside her when kind Death
should call him too.

Then he left her for a moment, and sent for the Kaffir driver and the Boer
to come, and, with him, dig her grave....

But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paradise, lying grunting on a bench in
the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to the kraals with the Cape boys. The
English officer looked at the rowdy landlord and the loafing men about the
tavern, and made up his mind. No hands other than his own should prepare a
last bed for her, his dearest.

So, all through the remainder of the long day, streaming and drenched with
perspiration, which the cold wind dried upon him, he wrought at a grave
for her with spade and pick.

It should be deep, because of the wild-cat and the hungry Kaffir dogs. It
should be wide, to leave room for him. The ground was hard, with boulders
of ironstone embedded in it. What did that matter? All the day through,
and all through the night of wind-driven mists and faint mo