We had dinner in the open, under the waggon sail which I had rigged up
as shelter from the sun, and which now did duty to give shelter from the
dew.
"I'm afraid it's all game fare to-night, Mrs Sewin," I said. "This is
roast bush-buck haunch, and that unsightly looking pot there beside the
Major contains a regular up-country game stew. I rather pride myself on
it, and it holds five different kinds of birds, besides bacon, and odd
notions in the way of pepper, etc."
"And that's what you call roughing it," was the answer. "Why, it looks
simply delicious."
"By Jove, Glanton, we must get the recipe from you," said the Major when
he had sampled it. "I never ate anything so good in my life."
Tom and another boy in the background, were deft when help was required,
and I know that if anybody ever enjoyed their dinner my guests did on
that occasion. And upon my word they might well have done so, for trust
an old up-country man for knowing how to make the best of the products
of the veldt; and the best is very good indeed. And as we partook of
this, by the light of a couple of waggon lanterns, slung from the poles
of our improvised tent, the surroundings were in keeping. On the open
side lay a panorama rapidly growing more and more dim as the stars began
to twinkle forth, a sweep of darkening country of something like fifty
or sixty miles, reaching away in the far distance beyond the Blood
River, on the left, and immediately in front, beyond the Tugela, the
wooded river bank and open plains and rocky hills of Zululand. Then,
suffusing the far horizon like the glow of some mighty grass fire, the
great disc of a broad full moon soared redly upward, putting out the
stars.
"Now this is what I call uncommonly jolly," pronounced the Major,
leaning back in his chair, and blowing out the first puffs of his after
dinner pipe.
"Hear--hear!" sung out Falkner. And then, warmed up into a glow of
generosity by a good dinner and plenty of grog, I'm blest if the fellow
didn't trot out quite a yarn about the cow chevying him and my timely
assegai throw; whereupon there was a disposition to make a hero of me on
the spot.
"Pooh! The thing was nothing at all," I objected. "An everyday affair,
if you're working with unbroken cattle."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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