Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt

Down, down to the far horizon sinks the westering sun, the malignant fierceness of his blazing countenance abating somewhat, for he is within an hour of his rest. Yet the earth still gives forth its shimmering heat, and on every side the red surface of the parched-up plain assumes a hue of blood beneath the golden glow of sunset, which, contrasted with the vivid blue of the heavens, is productive of a strangely weird and unearthly effect.

So thinks, at any rate, a horseman, toilsomely making his way over its inhospitable expanse. His steed, suffering terribly from want of water, as well as from a lack of nutritious food, can hardly drag its limbs along, and more than once has the rider endeavoured to relieve the poor beast by undertaking long spells of walking. But who can indulge in protracted exercise under such difficulties? Consequently the horseman, though of fine and powerful build, is nearly as fagged and used up as his unfortunate steed. Now and again a flying locust raps him in the face as he rides.

“What an infernal country!” he exclaims aloud, wiping his dripping forehead. “Nearly sunset, no sort of habitation in sight, and not even a drop of water in this howling desert. By Jove! the situation is getting serious,” he adds, in a tone bordering on alarm.

His alarm is not without reason. Since quitting last night’s camp beside a nearly dry waterhole, containing a noisome mixture, and that of the consistency of pea-soup, he has found no trace of the indispensable fluid. And he is lost. A worn-out horse under him, foodless, waterless, in the midst of an apparently interminable desert, he has every excuse for beginning to feel excessively concerned.

He is a fine, tall, well set-up man, this stranger. No partiality could define him as handsome. His features have no regularity, and his light-blue eyes are a trifle too small and deep set; but there is a certain power about his countenance, whose square, resolute jaw the short, fair, pointed beard and heavy, sweeping moustache can only half hide. Though his face and hands are burnt red brown, there is a subtle something which tells at a glance he is not colonial born, and that, too, quite apart from the newness of his travelling dress prematurely worn by rough usage, and of the serviceable valise which is strapped in front of his saddle.

A stony kopje, the only eminence for five miles around, rises before the traveller. This he has been using as a landmark, and through its agency steering in a straight line. It, too, having reached, he now ascends, and immediately there escapes him a pretty forcible ejaculation of relief. Away in front, breaking the deadly monotony of this horrible plain, lies a house – a homestead.

It is still three or four miles distant, though apparently nearer. But the horse has espied it as soon as his rider, and, pricking forward his ears, he picks up his head and steps out with something of an approach to briskness.

The first elation – at the certainty of finding necessaries, such as food and drink – over, the traveller’s thoughts turn to considerations of comfort. After all, the welcome haven is in all probability a mere rough Boer homestead, the abode of dirt and fleas, a place wherein comfort is an unknown quantity. And at such a prospect, hungry, thirsty, thoroughly wearied as he is, his spirits droop.

But his musings are interrupted in a sufficiently startling manner, by nothing less than the “whiz” of a bullet unpleasantly close to his head, simultaneously with the “bang” of the piece whence it was discharged.

Looking up, he finds that he has approached within a few hundred yards of the homestead. In the doorway of the same stands a tall man, clad in a shirt and trousers, with a gun in his hand, from which he is extracting the still smoking cartridge shell. Barely has he mastered these details than another bullet sings past his ear, this time nearer than the first, while the report rings out upon the evening air.

To say that the wayfarer begins to feel exceedingly uncomfortable is to express little. Here he is, a perfectly peaceable, unoffending person, about to seek the much-needed hospitality of yonder domicile, and suddenly, and without an iota of provocation, its owner proceeds to make a target of him in the most cold-blooded fashion. True, he has heard that many of the up-country Boers are a wild and lawless set, holding an Englishman in utter detestation. But this open and unprovoked “act of war” surpasses anything he may have been led to expect.

“Here, hallo! You, sir! What are you blazing away at me for?” he sings out, his tone betraying a degree of anger which prudence should have induced him to suppress.

His hand instinctively goes to the revolver slung round him in a holster under his coat. But of what use is a six-shooter against an enemy many hundred yards distant, and armed with a rifle? Therefore, it is with considerable relief that he beholds his unexpected adversary ground his piece, stare at him for a moment, then disappear indoors.

The feeling is but transitory, however, as it occurs to him that the fellow has probably gone in to get more cartridges, and that any moment he may find himself once more raked by the enemy’s fire. He judges it prudent to try the effect of a parley before venturing any nearer.

“Hi! Hallo, friend!” he shouts, “just drop that target practice, will you? There isn’t an ounce of harm about me. I’m nothing but a poor devil of a traveller lost in the veldt, and pretty well dead for want of a drink. D’you understand?”

Then it strikes him that if the inhospitable householder is, as he expects, a Boer, he will probably not understand.

“What is to be done?” exclaims the wayfarer in sheer despair. “Well, here goes. May as well be shot as starve in the veldt; and perhaps the fellow’s only playing the fool – trying what I’m made of – and, if I were only within fifty, or even a hundred yards of him, the ‘trying’ wouldn’t be all on one side.”

Thus musing, he continues his advance upon the homestead, walking his horse, and whistling in an attempt to appear thoroughly unconcerned, although, in point of actual fact, he feels pretty much as the Six Hundred must have done on receipt of the historic and idiotic order. But no more leaden greetings reach him, nor does the enemy appear. All is silent as the grave as he rides up to the house.

The front door stands wide open, exactly as the shooter had left it on retiring therefrom. There is not a sound of anybody moving inside. The place might have been uninhabited. Just then the sun, which all this time has gradually been sinking, and has already touched the horizon, disappears.

Something like a chill creeps over the traveller at the sudden gloom which falls upon the tenement just as he is about to cross its threshold. Standing at the door, he raps it, somewhat impatiently, with the handle of his whip. No answer.

Cautiously, and with hand on his pistol, he enters. There is no passage; the door opens straight into the sitting-room. At the sight which meets his eyes he starts, and involuntarily falls back.

In a corner of the room stands a tall figure. Leaning with one shoulder against the wall, its eyes are fixed upon the intruder, great hollow eyes, which seem to glitter strangely, and the deathly pallor of the face is enhanced by its framing of dark hair and beard. Though otherwise motionless, both hands and lips are working slightly, but no sound escapes the latter. The wayfarer, though not by any means a man of weak nerves, is conscious of something horribly uncanny about this ghostlike figure, so silent and immovable, glowering at him in the shades of the fast-gathering twilight.

But at the same time he recognises his recent assailant. No ghost this, but – a madman.

For a moment both stand staring at each other. Then the strange-looking figure speaks.

“Welcome, friend – welcome. Come in, come in. Make yourself at home. Have you brought any locusts with you? Lots of them – swarms, to eat up what little grass the drought has left. Have you brought them, I say? Aha – fine things, locusts! Don’t know how we should get on without them. Grand things for this Country! Fine country this! Green as an emerald. Emeralds, no, diamonds. But there isn’t a ‘stone’ on the place, devil a ‘stone.’”

“Locusts! Emeralds! Diamonds!” echoes the stranger in amazement. “Scott, but the poor chap’s clean off his chump – clean off it! What on earth am I to do with him, or with myself either for the matter of that?”

“Not a ‘stone’ on the place!” goes on the speaker, in a mournful tone. “I’ve fossicked high and low, and there isn’t one – not one. Ah, but – the Valley of the Eye! Come, friend. We will start at once. You shall make your fortune. Dirk! Dirk!” he shouts, passing the wondering stranger, and gaining the doorway.

A withered old Koranna, clad in a mangy sheep-skin kaross, who has just finished penning a flock of Angora goats in one of the kraals, comes running up at the summons. At sight of his master his parchment visage assumes a look of deep concern.

“Die Baas is reegte zick!” (“The master is properly ill.”) he says, turning to the stranger.

“I should rather think he was,” assents the latter, who, although his acquaintance with colonial Dutch is extremely limited, has no difficulty in grasping the old fellow’s meaning. “Stones, locusts, Valley of the Eye! Pho! The sooner we get him to bed the better. I say, Old man,” he breaks off persuasively, laying a hand on the shoulder of his unconscious host, “you’re not quite the thing, you know. Come along and turn in. I’ll give you a hand at getting your togs off.”

The other looks at him vacantly, and seems to comprehend. He suffers himself to be led into the inner room quite docilely, and there and then to be assisted into bed. Once there, however, the blood rushes to his face, and he begins raving horribly, though his violence finds expression in speech rather than in action.

The stranger sits at his bedside carefully watching him.

“Not mad – only fever,” he remarks to himself at the close of one of these paroxysms. “Bush fever, I suppose, and plenty of it. He’s got a pulse like a steam hammer, by Jove!”

He has. Not for nothing has that unwonted giddiness, those shooting pains in the limbs, attacked him a few hours earlier. By nightfall Renshaw Fanning is in a burning fever, raving in the throes of delirium.

Chapter Three.

Renshaw Fanning’s Secret

The stranger’s wants had been attended to by the old Koranna woman already described; which may be taken to mean that he had found time to snatch a hurried meal during one of the sick man’s quiet intervals. Then he had returned to his post.

His inhospitable, not to say dangerous, reception stood now accounted for, and with a vivid recollection of the same he took an early opportunity of carefully hiding all the firearms he could lay hands on. Old Dirk and his wife kept coming in on tiptoe to see how their master was getting on, and, in fact, betrayed an amount of concern for his well-being hardly to be looked for in the scions of a wild and degraded race. But Renshaw Fanning was a man to command attachment, from untutored and degraded savages no less than from a dog.

The night wore on, and these humble and faithful retainers, seeing that their master was in better hands than theirs, had retired to roost. The stranger, having dragged a capacious armchair into the bedroom, sat and watched. Who could this man be, he wondered, dwelling alone in this desert place, stricken with mortal sickness, and no one to tend him save a couple of miserable specimens of a miserable race, were it not that providentially he himself, in the character of a lost and starving wayfarer, had chanced upon the scene? His gaze wandered round the room. Its white-washed walls were bare and cracked, and devoid of ornament, save for a small but massive silver crucifix hanging above the bed, and an artistically carved statuette of the Blessed Virgin on a bracket. These objects, at any rate, pointed to their owner’s creed, a heritage received with his Irish descent, and the plainness, or roughness rather, of the domicile in general seemed to point to a hard and struggling existence.

The night brought with it but little respite from the broiling heat of the day. Not a breath stirred the air. Even with the house door and all the windows wide open the oppressive stuffiness of the room seemed wellnigh unbearable. Winged insects, attracted by the light, found their way in by swarms, and a huge tarantula, leaving his lair in the thatch, began to walk leisurely down the wall. With something like a shudder of disgust, the stranger picked up a slipper and shied it at the hairy monster, with the effect of making him scuttle back to the shelter of the friendly thatch as fast as his legs could carry him.

The sick man tossed restlessly from side to side, now moaning, now talking to himself. Listening intently, the watcher noted that the patient’s wildly spoken thoughts seemed to run strongly in two grooves – diamond seeking, and a member of the other sex. As to the latter, his voice would assume a thrilling tenderness as he passionately and oft seemed to be abjuring somebody of the name of Violet. As to the former, he was alternately despondent and fiercely sanguine, as he alluded again and again to a certain “Valley of the Eye.”

“The Valley of the Eye, by Jove!” muttered the watcher to himself. “Why, that’s the very thing he began about directly I came in. Said it was going to make our fortunes. There must be something in it – and – I’ll bet a guinea that thing he wears round his neck holds the secret, or the clue, to it,” he added, starting up in excitement over the idea.

He went softly over to the patient. The latter’s left hand was clutching a flat pouch or bag of buckskin which lay upon his chest. It was suspended from his neck by a stout lanyard of raw hide.

The watcher stood for a few minutes, his eyes glittering with a strange excitement. A temptation, which was well-nigh irresistible, had come upon him. Why should he not obtain possession of the pouch, and thus share in the secret which might lead to boundless wealth? He need not retain it long, only long enough to master its contents. He could easily return it.

Then his instincts of good seemed to get the upper hand. He was not a blackguard, he told himself, and surely to take advantage of this man’s helplessness to steal his secrets would be a blackguardly and dishonest act. But, alas and alas! When the possibility opens of acquiring wealth, a man’s best instincts are sure to be heavily handicapped, and so it was here.

He took a cup of milk which stood by the bedside, and, raising the patient’s head, put it to his lips. It was only goat’s milk, and thin stuff at that, thanks to the parched state of the veldt; but poor Renshaw drank eagerly, then fell back quiet and composed. It seemed as though the delirium had departed.

Watching him thus for a moment the stranger left him and sought the house door. He seemed to feel an irresistible longing for the open air. But so close, so stifling was the night that, as he stood outside, he hardly realised the change into the outer air. Not a living thing was moving, not a sound was heard, save now and then the trumpet-like sneeze of a goat in the kraals. Overhead, the dark vault of heaven seemed literally to flash and grow with constellations. Shooting stars darted, rocket-like, across the zenith in numbers unknown to our colder skies; and, as he looked, a bright meteor shot athwart the velvety space, leaving a red sinuous trail. But in the dead still solitude a voice seemed to whisper to his now heated imagination, “The Valley of the Eye! The Valley of the Eye!”

Re-entering, he stole a glance at his patient. The latter was now slumbering peacefully. His hand had relaxed its convulsive grasp of the buckskin pouch, and was resting beside him. Now was the time.

The stranger bent over him; then the deft “snick” of a sharp knife. The pouch was in his hand.

For the moment he felt like a common footpad. His heart beat violently as he regained his seat near the window and the light. For some minutes he sat watching the sick man. But the latter slept on peacefully. Now for the secret!