"Oh, you do, do you?" said Peter. "Well, I'm pretty sick of them. I had bother enough with mine," he said genially, warming his hands by the fire, and then interlocking the fingers and turning the palms towards the blaze as one who prepares to enjoy a good talk. "One girl was only fifteen; I got her cheap from a policeman who was living with her, and she wasn't much. But the other, by Gad! I never saw another nigger like her; well set up, I tell you, and as straight as that--" said Peter, holding up his finger in the firelight. "She was thirty if she was a day. Fellows don't generally fancy women that age; they like slips of girls. But I set my heart on her the day I saw her. She belonged to the chap I was with. He got her up north. There was a devil of a row about his getting her, too; she'd got a nigger husband and two children; didn't want to leave them, or some nonsense of that sort: you know what these niggers are? Well, I tried to get the other fellow to let me have her, but the devil a bit he would.
I'd only got the other girl, and I didn't much fancy her; she was only a child. Well, I went down Umtali way and got a lot of liquor and stuff, and when I got back to camp I found them clean dried out. They hadn't had a drop of liquor in camp for ten days, and the rainy season coming on and no knowing when they'd get any. Well, I'd a vatje of Old Dop as high as that--," indicating with his hand an object about two feet high, "and the other fellow wanted to buy it from me. I knew two of that. I said I wanted it for myself. He offered me this, and he offered me that. At last I said, 'Well, just to oblige you, I give you the vatje and you give me the girl!'
And so he did. Most people wouldn't have fancied a nigger girl who'd had two nigger children, but I didn't mind; it's all the same to me. And I tell you she worked. She made a garden, and she and the other girl worked in it; I tell you I didn't need to buy a sixpence of food for them in six months, and I used to sell green mealies and pumpkins to all the fellows about. There weren't many flies on her, I tell you. She picked up English quicker than I picked up her lingo, and took to wearing a dress and shawl."
The stranger still sat motionless, looking into the fire.
Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. "Well, I came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a nigger man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a word to a nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as cool as can be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked her to give him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn't think anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging about the camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and asked me for a lot of cartridges. She'd never asked me for anything before. I asked her what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and she said the old nigger woman who helped carry in water to the garden said she couldn't stay and help her any more unless she got some cartridges to give her son who was going up north hunting elephants. The woman got over me to give her the cartridges because she was going to have a kid, and she said she couldn't do the watering without help. So I gave them her. I never put two and two together.
"Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with the Matabele, I thought I'd volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to be got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought I'd only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women there, and a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I told them not to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to keep an eye on them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said the Mashonas didn't love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out that they loved them better than they loved us. They've got the damned impertinence to say, that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but the white man oppresses them all the time!
"Well, I left those women there," said Peter, dropping his hands on his knees. "Mind you, I'd treated those women really well. I'd never given either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all the fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn't been gone a month, when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had the woman first--he's dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut door with his throat cut--and what do you think he said to me? Why, I hadn't been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all the big one.
What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball and cartridge she could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and even the lid off the tea-box to melt into bullets for the old muzzle-loaders they have; and off she went, and took the young one too. The fellow wrote me they didn't touch another thing: they left the shawls and dresses I gave them kicking about the huts, and went off naked with only their blankets and the ammunition on their heads. A nigger man met them twenty miles off, and he said they were skooting up for Lo Magundi's country as fast as they could go.
"And do you know," said Peter, striking his knee, and looking impressively across the fire at the stranger; "what I'm as sure of as that I'm sitting here? It's that that nigger I caught at my hut, that day, was her nigger husband! He'd come to fetch her that time; and when she saw she couldn't get away without our catching her, she got the cartridges for him!" Peter paused impressively between the words. "And now she's gone back to him.
It's for him she's taken that ammunition!"
Peter looked across the fire at the stranger, to see what impression his story was making.
"I tell you what," said Peter, "if I'd had any idea that day who that bloody nigger was, the day I saw him standing at my door, I'd have given him one cartridge in the back of his head more than ever he reckoned for!"
