g with the Dutch travellers who brought the supplies of Hollands
and Cape brandy and lager beer, and the American or English gold-miners
and German drummers who put up there from time to time. Then the child lay
in the outhouse alone. It was a frail, puny creature, always frightened
and silent. It lived on a little mealie pap and odd bits of roaster-cakes
that were thrown to it as though it were a dog. When the coloured women
forgot to feed it, they said: "It does not matter. Anyhow, the thing will
die soon!" But it lived on when another child would have died.... There
was something uncanny about its great-eyed silence and its tenacious hold
on life.

It had only been able to toddle when brought to the tavern. The rains and
thunderstorms of spring went by, the summer passed, and it could walk
about. It was a weakly little creature, with great frightened eyes,
amber-brown, with violet flecks in their black-banded irises, and dark,
thick lashes; and the delicately-drawn eyebrows were dark too, though its
hair was soft yellow--just the colour of a chicken's down. Many a cuff it
got, and many a hard word, when its straying feet brought it into the way
of the rough life up at the tavern. But still the scrap of food was tossed
to it, and the worn-out petticoat roughly cobbled into a garment for its
little body; for Bough was a charitable man.

It was a poor orphan, he explained to people, the child of a consumptive
emigrant Englishman who had worked for the landlord of the tavern, and
left this burden for other shoulders when he died. Charitable travellers
frequently left benefactions towards the little one's clothing and keep.
Bough willingly took charge of the money. The child strayed here, there,
and everywhere. It was often lost, but nobody looked for it, and it always
came back. It liked to climb the cairn of boulders, or to sit on the long,
low hillock at the cairn's foot. The wire fencing had long been removed
from the enclosure; it had gone to make a chicken-pen in a more suitable
spot. The cross had been taken down when a prop was wanted for the
clothes-line.

The child, often beaten by Bough and the woman of the tavern, might have
been even worse treated by the coloured servants but for those two graves
out on the veld. Black blood flows thick with superstition, and both the
Kaffir cook and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chambermaid nourished a
wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew but that the white woman's ghost woul