TROOPER PETER HALKET OF MASHONALAND by Olive Schreiner Author of “Dreams,” “Dream Life and Real Life,” “The Story of an African Farm,” etc. Colonial Edition (A photographic plate at the front of the book shows three people hanging from a tree by their necks. Around them stand eight men, looking not at all troubled by their participation in the scene. Of this event all the survivors appear to be white, the victims black. The plate is titled “From a Photograph taken in Matabeleland.” S.A.) To a Great Good Man, Sir George Grey, Once Governor of the Cape Colony, who, during his rule in South Africa, bound to himself the Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives he governed, by an uncorruptible justice and a broad humanity; and who is remembered among us today as representing the noblest attributes of an Imperial Rule. “Our low life was the level’s and the night’s; He’s for the morning.” Olive Schreiner. 19, Russell Road, Kensington, W., February, 1897. Aardvark - The great anteater. Cape Smoke - A very inferior brandy made in Cape Colony. Kopje - Little hillock. Kraal - A Kaffir encampment. Mealies - Maize (corn). Riem - A thong of undressed leather universally used in South Africa. Vatje of Old Dop - A little cask of Cape brandy. Veld - Open Country. Chapter I. It was a dark night; a chill breath was coming from the east; not enough to disturb the blaze of Trooper Peter Halket’s fire, yet enough to make it quiver. He sat alone beside it on the top of a kopje. All about was an impenetrable darkness; not a star was visible in the black curve over his head. He had been travelling with a dozen men who were taking provisions of mealies and rice to the next camp. He had been sent out to act as scout along a low range of hills, and had lost his way. Since eight in the morning he had wandered among long grasses, and ironstone kopjes, and stunted bush, and had come upon no sign of human habitation, but the remains of a burnt kraal, and a down-trampled and now uncultivated mealie field, where a month before the Chartered Company’s forces had destroyed a native settlement. Three times in the day it had appeared to him that he had returned to the very spot from which he had started; nor was it his wish to travel very far, for he knew his comrades would come back to look for him, to the neighbourhood where he had last been seen, when it was found at the evening camping ground that he did not appear. Trooper Peter Halket was very weary. He had eaten nothing all day; and had touched little of the contents of a small flask of Cape brandy he carried in his breast pocket, not knowing when it would again be replenished.