Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland Part 8

Peter Halket looked up at him; the man seemed dead. He touched him softly on the arm, then shook it slightly.

The man opened his eyes slowly, without raising his head; and looked at Peter from under his weary eyebrows. Except that they moved they might have been the eyes of a dead thing.

Peter put up his fingers to his own lips--"Hus-h! hus-h!" he said.

The man hung torpid, still looking at Peter.

Quickly Peter Halket knelt down and took the knife from his belt. In an instant the riems that bound the feet were cut through; in another he had cut the riems from the waist and neck: the riems dropped to the ground from the arms, and the man stood free. Like a dazed dumb creature, he stood, with his head still down, eyeing Peter.

Instantly Peter slipped the red bundle from his arm into the man's pa.s.sive hand.

"Ari-tsemaia! Hamba! Loop! Go!" whispered Peter Halket; using a word from each African language he knew. But the black man still stood motionless, looking at him as one paralysed.

"Hamba! Sucka! Go!" he whispered, motioning his hand.

In an instant a gleam of intelligence shot across the face; then a wild transport. Without a word, without a sound, as the tiger leaps when the wild dogs are on it, with one long, smooth spring, as though unwounded and unhurt, he turned and disappeared into the gra.s.s. It closed behind him; but as he went the twigs and leaves cracked under his tread.

The Captain threw back the door of his tent. "Who is there?" he cried.

Peter Halket stood below the tree with the knife in his hand.

The noise roused the whole camp: the men on guard came running; guns were fired: and the half-sleeping men came rushing, grasping their weapons. There was a sound of firing at the little tree; and the cry went round the camp, "The Mashonas are releasing the spy!"

When the men got to the Captain's tent, they saw that the n.i.g.g.e.r was gone; and Peter Halket was lying on his face at the foot of the tree; with his head turned towards the Captain's door.

There was a wild confusion of voices. "How many were there?" "Where have they gone to now?" "They've shot Peter Halket!"--"The Captain saw them do it"--"Stand ready, they may come back any time!"

When the Englishman came, the other men, who knew he had been a medical student, made way for him. He knelt down by Peter Halket.

"He's dead," he said, quietly.

When they had turned him over, the Colonial knelt down on the other side, with a little hand-lamp in his hand.

"What are you fellows fooling about here for?" cried the Captain. "Do you suppose it's any use looking for foot marks after all this tramping!

Go, guard the camp on all sides!"

"I will send four coloured boys," he said to the Englishman and the Colonial, "to dig the grave. You'd better bury him at once; there's no use waiting. We start first thing in the morning."

When they were alone, the Englishman uncovered Peter Halket's breast.

There was one small wound just under the left bosom; and one on the crown of the head; which must have been made after he had fallen down.

"Strange, isn't it, what he can have been doing here?" said the Colonial; "a small wound, isn't it?"

"A pistol shot," said the Englishman, closing the bosom.

"A pistol--"

The Englishman looked up at him with a keen light in his eye.

"I told you he would not kill that n.i.g.g.e.r.--See--here--" He took up the knife which had fallen from Peter Halket's grasp, and fitted it into a piece of the cut leather that lay on the earth.

"But you don't think--" The Colonial stared at him with wide open eyes; then he glanced round at the Captain's tent.

"Yes, I think that--Go and fetch his great-coat; we'll put him in it. If it is no use talking while a man is alive, it is no use talking when he is dead!"

They brought his great-coat, and they looked in the pockets to see if there was anything which might show where he had come from or who his friends were. But there was nothing in the pockets except an empty flask, and a leathern purse with two shillings in, and a little hand-made two-pointed cap.

So they wrapped Peter Halket up in his great-coat, and put the little cap on his head.

And, one hour after Peter Halket had stood outside the tent looking up, he was lying under the little tree, with the red sand trodden down over him, in which a black man and a white man's blood were mingled.

All the rest of the night the men sat up round the fires, discussing what had happened, dreading an attack.

But the Englishman and the Colonial went to their tent, to lie down.

"Do you think they will make any inquiries?" asked the Colonial.

"Why should they? His time will be up tomorrow."

"Are you going to say anything?"

"What is the use?"

They lay in the dark for an hour, and heard the men chatting outside.

"Do you believe in a G.o.d?" said the Englishman, suddenly.

The Colonial started: "Of course I do!"

"I used to," said the Englishman; "I do not believe in your G.o.d; but I believed in something greater than I could understand, which moved in this earth, as your soul moves in your body. And I thought this worked in such wise, that the law of cause and effect, which holds in the physical world, held also in the moral: so, that the thing we call justice, ruled. I do not believe it any more. There is no G.o.d in Mashonaland."

"Oh, don't say that!" cried the Colonial, much distressed. "Are you going off your head, like poor Halket?"

"No; but there is no G.o.d," said the Englishman. He turned round on his shoulder, and said no more: and afterwards the Colonial went to sleep.

Before dawn the next morning the men had packed up the goods, and started.

By five o'clock the carts had filed away; the men rode or walked before and behind them; and the s.p.a.ce where the camp had been was an empty circle; save for a few broken bottles and empty tins, and the stones about which the fires had been made, round which warm ashes yet lay.

Only under the little stunted tree, the Colonial and the Englishman were piling up stones. Their horses stood saddled close by.

Presently the large trooper came riding back. He had been sent by the Captain to ask what they were fooling behind for, and to tell them to come on.

The men mounted their horses to follow him; but the Englishman turned in his saddle and looked back. The morning sun was lighting up the straggling branches of the tall trees that had overshadowed the camp; and fell on the little stunted tree, with its white stem and outstretched arms; and on the stones beneath it.

"It's all that night on the kopje!" said the Colonial, sadly.

But the Englishman looked back. "I hardly know," he said, "whether it is not better for him now, than for us."