“Have you fire?” I asked of the skeleton Boers, for they were nothing more.

“Nein, nein,” they answered; “our fire is dead.”

I produced the tinder-box which I carried with me, and struck the flint.  Ten minutes later we had a cheerful blaze, and within three-quarters of an hour good soup, for iron pots were not wanting—­only food to put into them.  I think that for the rest of that day those poor creatures did little else but eat, sleeping between their meals.  Oh! the joy I had in feeding them, especially after the wagons arrived, bringing with them salt—­how they longed for that salt!—­sugar and coffee.

CHAPTER IX

THE PROMISE

Of the original thirty-five souls, not reckoning natives, who had accompanied Henri Marais upon his ill-fated expedition, there now remained but nine alive at the new Maraisfontein.  These were himself, his daughter, four Prinsloos—­a family of extraordinary constitution—­and three Meyers, being the husband of the poor woman I had seen committed to the grave and two of her six children.  The rest, Hernan Pereira excepted, had died of fever and actual starvation, for when the fever lessened with the change of the seasons, the starvation set in.  It appeared that, with the exception of a very little, they had stored their powder in a kind of outbuilding which they constructed, placing it at a distance for safety’s sake.  When most of the surviving men were away, however, a grass fire set light to this outbuilding and all the powder blew up.

After this, for a while they supplied the camp with food by the help of such ammunition as remained to them.  When that failed they dug pits in which to catch game.  In time the buck came to know of these pits, so that they snared no more.

Then, as the “biltong” or sun-dried meat they had made was all consumed, they were driven to every desperate expedient that is known to the starving, such as the digging up of bulbs, the boiling of grass, twigs and leaves, the catching of lizards, and so forth.  I believe that they actually ate caterpillars and earthworms.  But after their last fire went out through the neglect of the wretched Kaffir who was left to watch it, and having no tinder, they failed to relight it by friction, of course even this food failed them.  When I arrived they had practically been three days without anything to eat except green leaves and grass, such as I saw the child chewing.  In another seventy hours doubtless every one of them would have been dead.

Well, they recovered rapidly enough, for those who had survived its ravages were evidently now impervious to fever.  Who can tell the joy that I experienced as I watched Marie returning from the very brink of the grave to a state of full and lovely womanhood?  After all, we were not so far away from the primitive conditions of humanity, when the first duty of man was to feed his women and his children, and I think that something of that instinct remains with us.  At least, I know I never experienced a greater pleasure than I did, when the woman I loved, the poor, starving woman, ate and ate of the food which I was able to give her—­she who for weeks had existed upon locusts and herbs.