“Oh, yes!” I answered; “but why were you going to sleep in the cart?”

“Baas,” he replied, “I was not; I prepared it for you.  How did I know that you were coming?  Oh, very simply.  I sat on the stoep and listened to all the talk in the sitkammer.  The window has never been mended, baas, since the Quabies broke it.  God in Heaven! what a talk that was.  I never knew that white people could have so much to say about a simple matter.  You want to marry the Baas Marais’s daughter; the baas wants her to marry another man who can pay more cattle.  Well, among us it would soon have been settled, for the father would have taken a stick and beaten you out of the hut with the thick end.  Then he would have beaten the girl with the thin end until she promised to take the other man, and all would have been settled nicely.  But you Whites, you talk and talk, and nothing is settled.  You still mean to marry the daughter, and the daughter still means not to marry the man of many cows.  Moreover, the father has really gained nothing except a sick heart and much bad luck to come.”

“Why much bad luck to come, Hans?” I asked idly, for his naive summing up of the case interested me in a vague way.

“Oh!  Baas Allan, for two reasons.  First, your reverend father, who made me true Christian, told him so, and a predicant so good as he, is one down whom the curse of God runs from Heaven like lightning runs down a tree.  Well, the Heer Marais was sitting under that tree, and we all know what happens to him who is under a tree when the lightning strikes it.  That my first Christian reason.  My second black-man reason, about which there can be no mistake, for it has always been true since there was a black man, is that the girl is yours by blood.  You saved her life with your blood,” and he pointed to my leg, “and therefore bought her for ever, for blood is more than cattle.  Therefore, too, he who would divide her from you brings blood on her and on the other man who tries to steal her, blood, blood! and on himself I know not what.”  And he waved his yellow arms, staring up at me with his little black eyes in a way that was most uncanny.

“Nonsense!” I said.  “Why do you talk such bad words?”

“Because they are true words, Baas Allan.  Oh, you laugh at the poor Totty; but I had it from my father, and he from his father from generation to generation, amen, and you will see.  You will see, as I have seen before now, and as the Heer Marais will see, who, if the great God had not made him mad—­for mad he is, baas, as we know, if you Whites don’t—­might have lived in his home till he was old, and have had a good son-in-law to bury him in his blanket.”

Now I seemed to have had enough of this eerie conversation.  Of course it is easy to laugh at natives and their superstitions, but, after a long life of experience, I am bound to admit that they are not always devoid of truth.  The native has some kind of sixth sense which the civilised man has lost, or so it seems to me.