‘_Gott sei dank!_’ he muttered, ‘there needs no burial here,’ and his eye followed the spoor into a cave at the rock base. Once again he looked at the helpless corpse, and a thought came into his mind. He rolled from the side of the rocks a large stone, rubbed on it some of the blood still dripping from his own leg, and placed it close to the head of the dead man--then: ‘It will be thought he fell, and struck his head, for soon there will be but bones,’ he said with a grin; then with a muttered oath, and a hurried look around and back, half of fear and half of hate, he fled painfully and wearily, but with noiseless steps, towards where in the far distance the embers of the camp fire still cast a red glow, and whence an occasional grunt from a half-slumbering mule was borne towards him on the breath of the dawn. Rapidly and wearily he fled, in the misty half light, and behind him in the darkness rose and fell the unearthly yowl--the jackal’s grace before meat. ‘The feast begins,’ he muttered, and as answering cries came from the scrub to the right and left of him, ‘Good eating, all of you!--this was he born for.’ * * * * * ‘Not guilty’ was the verdict; ‘guilty, but not enough evidence,’ the comment of the Court, for Hopper’s horse, a gaunt silverbacked jackal, and a Cokerbôm tree were not asked to give testimony. To this day, if you should chance to take Pietris Vanhiever with you on a shooting trip, do not over your camp fire discourse on native superstitions pertaining to the _Karroo_--it is calculated to upset an otherwise good hunter. A PRAIRIE OYSTER ‘I drink my love at the fall of night, As the glow dies out of the Western sky; I drink to the whirr of the widgeon’s flight, And the coyote’s yowl, as we drundle by. ‘I drink my love in the prairie morn, With a “Hey! farewell!” to the falling moon, To the stars a-point at the flush of dawn, And the waking cry of the watchful loon. ‘I drink my love in the heat and glare, With the sun a-flame on the silent lake; I drink to the hum of the quivering air, To the beat and throb of the world awake. ‘Here’s a toast to them all! And it’s sung refrain Is the clink and jar of a westward train.’ We droned along in one of those fits of despondency peculiar to trains that have an immensity of flat ground in which to pick up their lost time. The night was a lovely one, hot, with a bright moon silvering the prairie, and trying vainly to throw shadows in a shadowless space. In a meditative mood, I lounged on the platform against the open door of the smoking car, and it seemed to me that I was taking a lesson in the comprehension of infinity. A rolling plain as far as the eye could reach--not a tree--not a house--as limitless and as empty as the sky itself.