Page:Traffics and Discoveries.djvu/45

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THE CAPTIVE
33


White Man in six places at once—two hemispheres and four continents—America, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your head,” he says. “You know right well if you'd been caught at this game in our country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,” he says, “and you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.” And he threw me half-a-crown—English money.

'Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but the cold God's truth of the matter is—the money on the floor did it.. . . I give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.

' I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but I dream about it. And it's Hell!

' How do you regard the proposition—as a Brother ? If you'd invented your own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her—and had paid your own expenses from the word “go”? An American citizen has a right to choose his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite . . . and I'd risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man's address from Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But he never answered. Guess he thought I lied.. . . Damned Southern rebel!

D