d
rise out of the kopje there, some dark night, and pinch and cuff and thump
and beat people who had ill-used her bantling? As for the dead man buried
at her feet, his dim shape had often been seen by one of the Barala
stablemen, keeping guard before the heap of boulders, in the white blaze
of the moon-rays, or the paler radiance of a starry night, or more often
of a night of mist and rain; not moving as a sentry moves, but upright and
still, with shining fiery eyes in his shadowy face, and with teeth that
showed, as the dead grin. After that none of the servants would pass near
these two graves later than sundown, and Bough welted the Barala boy with
an ox-reim for scaring silly jades of women with lying tales. But then
Bough avoided the spot by day as well as by night. Therefore, it became a
constant place of refuge for the child, who now slept in the outhouse
alone.

In the long, brilliant winter nights she would leave the straw-stuffed
sack that had been her bed ever since the orange-box had been broken up,
and climb the stone-heaps, and look over the lonely veld, and stare up at
the great glowing constellation of the Southern Cross. In spring, when
pools and river-beds were full of foaming beer-coloured water, and every
kloof and donga was brimmed with flowers and ferns, she would be drawn
away by these, would return, trailing after her armfuls of rare blooms,
and thenceforward, until these faded, the ridgy grave-mound and the heaped
cairn of boulders would be gay with them. She never took them to the
house. It might have meant a beating--so many things did.

Late in November, when the apricots and plums and peaches were ripening on
the laden, starling-haunted boughs, she would wander in the orchard
belonging to the house, while the heavy drenching rains drummed on the
leaves overhead, and sudden furious thunderstorms rent the livid-coloured
clouds above with jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire,
or leaping, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this
fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering, and
made a black scorched mark all down the cliff-face, but left the child
unscathed.

No one had ever taught her anything; no one had ever laid a gentle hand
upon her. When she first saw mother and daughter, friend and friend,
sweetheart and sweetheart kiss, it seemed to her that they licked each
other, as friendly dogs do. She had no name that she knew of.