l naturally spend all your life on farms."

Katje's flush was a distress-signal. First blood to the Vrouw.

"Baboons," continued the old lady, "are among a farmer's worst
enemies; they steal and destroy and menace all the year around. But,
for all that, there are many farmers who will not shoot or trap them.
And these, you will notice, are always farmers of a ripe age and sense
shaped by experience. _They_ know, you may be sure. My stepsister's
first husband, Shadrach van Guelder, shot at baboons once, and was so
frightened afterwards that he was afraid to be alone in the dark."

There was a story toward, and no one moved.

"There were many Kafirs on his farm, which you have not seen," pursued
the Vrouw Grobelaar, adjusting her voice to narrative pitch. "It was
on the fringe of the Drakensberg, and many spurs of hill, divided by
deep kloofs like gashes, descended on to it. So plenty of water came
down, and the cattle were held from straying by the rocks, on one side
at any rate. The Kafirs had their kraals dotted all about the land;
and as they were of the kind that work, my stepsister's husband
suffered them to remain and grow their little patches of mealies,
while they worked for him in between. He was, of course, a cattle
Boer, as all of our family have always been, but here were so many
Kafirs to be had for nothing that he soon commenced to plow great
spaces of land and sow valuable crops. There was every prospect that
we would make very much money out of that farm; for corn always sells,
even when cattle are going for only seven pounds apiece, and Shadrach
van Guelder was very cheerful about it.

"But when a farmer weighs an ungrown crop, you will always find that
there is something or other he does not take into account. He tells
off the weather and the land and the Kafirs and the water on his
fingers, and forgets to bend down his thumb to represent God--or
something. Shadrach van Guelder lifted up his eyes to the hills from
whence came the water, but it was not until the green corn was six
inches high that he saw that there came with it baboons--armies and
republics of them; more baboons than he had thought to exist. They
swooped down on his sprouting lands, and rioted, ate, and rooted,
trampled and wantoned, with that kind of bouncing devilishness that
not even a Kafir can correctly imitate. In one night they undid all
his work on five sown morgen of fat land, and with the first wink of
the sun in the east