to be an exceptionally
sharp one; indeed, but for the accident of Sybrandt happening along
almost immediately after the Matabele raid, the tidings of which had
reached England, as we have seen--it is probable that a fatal
termination might have ensued. But Sybrandt had tended him with devoted
and loyal _camaraderie_, and when sufficiently restored, he had decided
to sell off everything and clear out. "You'll come back again,
Blachland," Sybrandt had said. "Mark my words, you'll come back again.
We all do." And he had answered that perhaps he would, but not just yet
awhile.

He had gone down country to the seaside, but the heat at Durban was so
great at the time of year as to counteract the beneficial effect of the
sea air. Then he had bethought himself of George Bayfield, a man he had
known previously and liked, and who had more than once pressed him to
pay him a visit at his farm in the Eastern Province. And now, here he
was.

A great feeling of restfulness and self-gratulation was upon him. He
was free once more, free for a fresh clean start. The sequence of his
foolishness, which had hung around his neck like a millstone, for years,
had been removed, had suddenly fallen off like a load. For he had come
to see things clearer now. His character had changed and hardened
during that interval, and he had come to realise that hitherto, his
views of life, and his way of treating its conditions, had been very
much those of a fool.

George Bayfield had received him with a very warm welcome. He was a
colonial man, and had never been out of his native land, yet contrasting
them as they stood together it was Blachland who looked the harder and
more weather-beaten of the two, so thorough an acclimatising process had
his up-country wanderings proved. Bayfield was a man just the wrong
side of fifty, and a widower. Two of his boys were away from home, and
at that time his household consisted of a small son of eleven, and a
daughter--of whom more anon.

The kloof opened out into a wide open valley, covered mainly with
rhenoster brush and a sprinkling of larger shrubs in clumps. From this
valley on either side, opened lateral kloofs, similar to the one from
which they had just emerged, kloofs dark with forest and tangled
thickets, very nurseries for tiger and wild-dogs, Bayfield declared--but
they had the compensating element of affording good sport whenever he
wanted to go out and shoot a bushbuck or two--as in th