On arriving at the mouth of Groote Kloof about four o’clock in the afternoon, my father and I were astonished to see a great number of Boers assembled there, and among them a certain sprinkling of their younger womankind, who had come on horseback or in carts.

“Good gracious!” I said to my father; “if I had known there was to be such a fuss as this about a shooting match, I don’t think I could have faced it.”

“Hum,” he answered; “I think there is more in the wind than your match.  Unless I am much mistaken, it has been made the excuse of a public meeting in a secluded spot, so as to throw the Authorities off the scent.”

As a matter of fact, my father was quite right.  Before we arrived there that day the majority of those Boers, after full and long discussion, had arranged to shake the dust of the Colony off their feet, and find a home in new lands to the north.

Presently we were among them, and I noticed that, one and all, their faces were anxious and preoccupied.  Pieter Retief caught sight of me being helped out of the cart by my father and Hans, whom I had brought to load, and for a moment looked puzzled.  Evidently his thoughts were far away.  Then he remembered and exclaimed in his jolly voice: 

“Why! here is our little Englishman come to shoot off his match like a man of his word.  Friend Marais, stop talking about your losses”—­this in a warning voice—­“and give him good day.”

So Marais came, and with him Marie, who blushed and smiled, but to my mind looked more of a grown woman than ever before; one who had left girlhood behind her and found herself face to face with real life and all its troubles.  Following her close, very close, as I was quick to notice, was Hernan Pereira.  He was even more finely dressed than usual and carried in his hand a beautiful new, single-barrelled rifle, also fitted to take percussion caps, but, as I thought, of a very large bore for the purpose of goose shooting.

“So you have got well again,” he said in a genial voice that yet did not ring true.  Indeed, it suggested to me that he wished I had done nothing of the sort.  “Well, Mynheer Allan, here you find me quite ready to shoot your head off.” (He didn’t mean that, though I dare say he was.) “I tell you that the mare is as good as mine, for I have been practising, haven’t I, Marie? as the ‘aasvogels’” (that is, vultures) “round the stead know to their cost.”

“Yes, Cousin Hernan,” said Marie, “you have been practising, but so, perhaps, has Allan.”

By this time all the company of Boers had collected round us, and began to evince a great interest in the pending contest, as was natural among people who rarely had a gun out of their hands, and thought that fine shooting was the divinest of the arts.  However, they were not allowed to stay long, as the Kaffirs said that the geese would begin their afternoon flight within about half an hour.  So the spectators