“What the devil do you mean by firing at me?” he asked.
“_Allemachter, carle!_” (Almighty, my dear fellow) was the cool answer, “I thought that you were a vilderbeeste calf. I galloped the cow and killed her, and she had a calf with her, and when I got the cartridges out of my rifle—for one stuck and took me some time—and the new ones in, I looked up, and there, as I thought, was the calf. So I got my rifle on and let drive, first with one barrel and then with the other, and when I saw you jump up like that and shout, and that I had been firing at a man, I nearly fainted. Thank the Almighty I did not hit you.”
John listened coldly. “I suppose that I am bound to believe you, _Meinheer_ Muller,” he said. “But I have been told that you have the most wonderful sight of any man in these parts, which makes it odd that at three hundred yards you should mistake a man upon his hands and knees for a vilderbeeste calf.”
“Does the Captain think, then, that I wished to murder him; especially,” he added, “after I shook his hand this morning?”
“I don’t know what I think,” answered John, looking straight into Muller’s eyes, which fell before his own. “All I know is that your curious mistake very nearly cost me my life. Look here!” and he took a lock of his brown hair out of the crown of his perforated hat and showed it to the other.
“Ay, it was very close. Let us thank God that you escaped.”
“It could not well have been closer, _Meinheer_. I hope that, for your own sake and for the sake of the people who go out shooting with you, you will not make such a mistake again. Good-morning!”
The handsome Boer, or Anglo-Boer, sat on his horse stroking his beautiful beard and gazing curiously after John Niel’s sturdy English-looking figure as he marched towards the cart, for, of course, the wounded vilderbeeste had long ago vanished.
“I wonder,” he said to himself aloud, as he turned his horse’s head and rode leisurely away, “if the old _volk_ are right after all, and if there is a God.” Frank Muller was sufficiently impregnated with modern ideas to be a free-thinker. “It almost seems like it,” he went on, “else how did it come that the one bullet passed under his belly and the other just touched his head without harming him? I aimed carefully enough too, and I could make the shot nineteen times out of twenty and not miss. Bah, a God! I snap my fingers at Him. Chance is the only god. Chance blows men about like the dead grass, till death comes down like the veldt fire and devours them. But there are men who ride chance as one rides a young colt—ay, who turn its headlong rushing and rearing to their own ends—who let it fly hither and thither till it is weary, and then canter it along the road that leads to triumph. I, Frank Muller, am one of those men. I never fail in the end. I will kill that Englishman. Perhaps I will kill old Silas Croft and the Hottentot too. Bah! they do not know what is coming. I know; I have helped to lay the mine; and unless they bend to my will I shall be the one to fire it. I will kill them all, and I will take Mooifontein, and then I will marry Bessie. She will fight against it, but that will make it all the sweeter. She loves that _rooibaatje_; I know it; and I will kiss her over his dead body. Ah! there are the carts. I don’t see the Captain. Driven home, I suppose, on account of the shock to his nerves. Well, I must talk to those fools. Lord, what fools they are with their chatter about the ‘land,’ and the ‘_verdomde Britische Gouvernment_.’ They don’t know what is good for them. Silly sheep, with Frank Muller for a shepherd! Ay, and they shall have Frank Muller for a president one day, and I will rule them too. Bah! I hate the English; but I am glad that I am half English for all that, for that is where I get the brains! But these people—fools, fools! Well, I shall pipe and they shall dance!”
