ace on me; you shall be punished.' And he
carried her back.

"He did whip her--not brutally or terribly, I believe, as a
man might do from wounded pride and revenge, but as a child
is whipped, to warn it against future foolishness. And from
the time of that beating the course of their life changed.
She was no longer a child, but a very grave and silent
woman, not prayerful at all, as might have been hoped, but
just still and solemn. Dreadful, I call it. Then the young
man Moore entered their lives.

"Jan Uys was making a dam right below the Hangklip. You
know the dam: half of it is cut from the rock, and the
water all comes into it from the end. It was not a matter
of half a dozen Kafirs with spades, like most dams, but a
business for dynamite and all kinds of ticklish and awkward
work. So Jan wisely did not put his own fingers to it, but
sent to the Rand for an Uitlander to come out and burst the
rocks; and they sent him this young fellow, the Irishman
Moore. He was a tall youth, with hair like some of the red
in that sunset over yonder, and a most astonishing way of
making you laugh only by talking about ordinary things. And
when he joked anybody would laugh, even the Predikant, who
was always preaching about the crackling of thorns under a
pot. With him, in a black box like a little coffin, he had
a machine he called a banjo, upon which he would play lewd
and idolatrous music which was most pleasing to the ear;
and he would sing songs while he played, which all ended
with a yell. He was good at bursting the rocks, too. He
would load holes full of dynamite in three or four places
at once, and fetch tons of stone and earth out with each
explosion. Jan Uys was pleased with him, for the young man
cared nothing at all for his savage looks and ugly ways,
and called him the Old Obadiah, who was a writer of the
Bible.

"'My wife,' he told him, 'is a young woman, and sad. You
must talk to her in the evenings and make her laugh.'

"The Irishman looked at him with a strange face. 'The poor
creature needs a laugh,' he said.

"So he used to talk to her on the stoop in the evenings,
while Jan sat within at his Bible, and heard the murmur of
their talk without. More than once, too, he heard a sound
that was no longer familiar to him--the sound of Dia's
pleasant childish laughter, and he scowled at his book and
told himself he was satisfied. I think, perhaps, he had
sometimes seen himself as he was, an old hard man crush