"So the tale was true," they heard him say; and then Piet sprang out, with Klein Piet at his heels, flung up his gun, and fired at the pit. The smoke of the shot blew back into their faces; its noise, peremptory and sudden, thrust their alert faculties from their poise; an effort was needed ere they saw clear again. The pit was empty.
"I don't know," answered Piet. "I thought--but I don't know. Let us go and see what _they_ have done to the chain."
Klein Piet had his tinderbox in his pocket; by the light he made, they both bent to look at the link on the ground.
"It is deeper," said Klein Piet. "The cut is half through the iron."
They went back to the camp in a silence of utter bewilderment. To his wife's look and the questions of the younger boys, Piet only answered that he had found no one. The old kafir had gone off without a word to his place among Piet's kafirs, and presently Susanna moved off to her bed in the wagon. Piet packed Jan and Andries off after her, and remained smoking by the fire with Klein Piet opposite him.
"Now," said Klein Piet, when they were alone; "what was it you saw?"
Piet took the pipe from his lips and gazed at him across the fire.
"As sure as death," he said, "I saw the pit swarming with men like birds over a wheatfield. And you?"
"I saw it too," answered Klein Piet. "And the men with the hammers--they were naked to the waist and hairy like baboons."
They stared at each other stupidly, half-aghast at the knowledge they shared. Their faces, in the firelight, were white and hard.
"Have we trekked too far?" said Piet, almost in a whisper. "Can a man trek to hell? God, there are those hammers again."
Clink, Clink! they sounded, pounding away in the night, clear and even as the ticking of a clock.
"They will have it cut by morning," whispered Klein Piet. "What will happen then?"
Piet was listening to the sounds, with his pipe poised in front of his mouth. He shook his head.
"I don't know," he answered. "But we will see. Klein Piet, you and I will keep the _brand-wacht_ to-night. If anything is to happen, we will be awake for it."
"Yes, father," answered Klein Piet mechanically, and then the talk between them dropped. On either side of the fire they sat in long stages of silence, listening to the hammers plying in the night, their noise making a rythm above the slow murmur of the water on the beach. A little wind got up, blowing from the north; it carried the scent of the seaweed and the damp sand to their nostrils and fanned their smoldering fire to a clearer glow. Somewhere in the bush a jackal sobbed like a lost child; the wood ask clicked and rustled as it burned out and settled down. And through it all, like the dominant of a harmony, the hammers spoke their unceasing clink and the darkness stirred like a windy arras.
