hem three tigers, as we call leopards,
two of them big and one half-grown. But the tigers did them no harm,
for God forbade them; they only looked at them a little and then slipped
away, purring as they went.

Now Suzanne rose, and taking the boy by the hand she began to lead him
homeward, very slowly, since he was footsore and exhausted, and for the
last half of the way could only walk resting upon her shoulder. Still
through the long night they crawled forward, for the _kopje_ at the back
of our stead was a guide to Suzanne, stopping from time to time to rest
a while, till at the breaking of the dawn with their last strength they
came to the house, as has been told.

Well it was that they did so, for it seems that the searchers had
already sought them in the very kloof where they were hidden, without
seeing anything of them behind the thick screen of the mimosas, and
having once sought doubtless they would have returned there no more, for
the hills are wide and the kloofs in them many.

CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF THE SHIPWRECK

"What shall we do with this boy whom Suzanne has brought to us, wife?"
asked Jan of me that day while both the children lay asleep.

"Do with him, husband!" I answered; "we shall keep him; he is the Lord's
gift."

"He is English, and I hate the English," said Jan, looking down.

"English or Dutch, husband, he is of noble blood, and the Lord's gift,
and to turn him away would be to turn away our luck."

"But how if his people come to seek him?"

"When they come we will talk of it, but I do not think that they will
come; I think that the sea has swallowed them all."

After that Jan said no more of this matter for many years; indeed I
believe that from the first he desired to keep the child, he who was
sonless.

Now while the boy lay asleep Jan mounted his horse and rode for two
hours to the stead of our neighbour, the Heer van Vooren. This Van
Vooren was a very rich man, by far the richest of us outlying Boers, and
he had come to live in these wilds because of some bad act that he had
done; I think that it was the shooting of a coloured person when he was
angry. He was a strange man and much feared, sullen in countenance, and
silent by nature. It was said that his grandmother was a chieftainess
among the red Kaffirs, but if so, the blood showed more in his son and
only child than in himself. Of this son, who in after years was named
Swart Piet, and his evil doings I shall have t