"Well, come and knock mine off," was the curt invitation; and during the derisive laughter that followed Hayhurst sat down.

"Shake!"

Mat Rentoul had emerged from his corner, and, swaying at Lawless' elbow, unsteadily advanced his huge fist.

"Shake!" he repeated peremptorily. And on the command being complied with, he turned about and harangued the rest. "Said I'd 'it 'im, didn't I? Well, 'e can 'it me, if 'e likes. I'll 'it any man whot isn't a friend of 'is. That woman I spoke of--"

"Oh! dry up," shouted Lawless, beginning to lose his temper.

"'It me, if you like," returned Mat imperturbably... "I've said you might... Gave 'er 'is last thick 'un, 'e did, and 'elped 'er back to 'er friends. She told me 'erself... You did--you lie!--an' took in yer belt two 'oles when you fancied she wasn't looking. I don't care what h.e.l.l's sc.u.m you chum with... they won't do you any 'arm."

"Oh! let him alone, Grit," the man whose pouch he had shared, and who was called Graves, interposed carelessly. "n.o.body's listening. Send round the bottle, boys. There's been too much leakage in one quarter.

Play fair."

Somebody produced a tin whistle, and after a very creditable performance on it, took a draught from a gla.s.s another man offered him, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and started a familiar music-hall ditty.

"You take solo, Tom," Stephens suggested.

Hayhurst, who was lying sulking, with his elbow on the floor and his hand supporting his head, kicked out a dusty riding-boot aggressively, but made no other move.

"I'm holding my jaw," he said.

"Don't be a jacka.s.s. If you won't take the solo, I will."

The other rolled over and sat up.

"There's one thing I object to more strongly than singing myself on the present occasion," he remarked, "and that's listening to you. Give me the note, Bill, and then go ahead."

The men sat round, smoking and listening, while Bill played his little tin whistle, and the youngster sang in a throaty tenor some jingling absurdity about a girl and a balloon. Each in his way was an artist, and made music out of the poor material. Mat Rentoul grew noisily hilarious, and then tearful; but he joined in the chorus with the rest.

l.u.s.ty and strong rang out the voices from half a dozen stalwart throats, all of which needed lubricating when the song was finished before they started afresh. Through the open window the sound floated out into the night. The stars that hung low in the purple heavens blinked as it were with astonishment at this rude breaking of the surrounding peace, and someone, crouching in the darkness against the mud wall of the hut, with the dirty blanket wrapped around her to protect her from the cold, opened wide eyes and listened intently to the unfamiliar noise.

One by one the voices trailed off, till only the tenor was left singing to the thin accompaniment of the tireless tin whistle. Then that too ceased, and the night was silent again, given over to the watchful stars and the stirless air, as they waited for the dawn.

Lawless looked round on his sleeping guests, and stirred the fire noisily with his boot until it leapt into flame. Slumber had overtaken these men where they sprawled before the hearth. Some rested easily with their heads pillowed on their arms; one--it was Rentoul--lay like a log on his back, his great mouth open, breathing stertorously, and his twitching limbs flung wide.

"Hogs!" he muttered.

He fetched a pillow from one of the bedrooms, and lifting Rentoul's inert head slipped it underneath. As he straightened himself after the performance of this office he became aware of a pair of eyes that followed his movements with interest, and perceived that among those silent figures one at least was wakeful and alert.

Hayhurst sat up, and then got upon his feet.

"Not all hogs this journey," he said. And added: "The bed where that pillow came from will serve me better than the floor."

Lawless nodded.

"There's a bed apiece," he answered. "The floor to-night is good enough for these."

He flung on fresh logs, and stepping between the closely packed forms, took up the lamp from the table and led the way to the bedrooms. Before separating for the night Hayhurst held out his hand.

"To show there's no ill-feeling," he explained with a self-conscious laugh.

Notwithstanding the late carousal of the previous night, the morning found the men early astir. Rentoul awoke only half sober, and had to sharpen his faculties with a nip before he rose, and, despite his overnight homily on personal cleanliness, wiped the dust from his hair and beard with a grimy hand and sat down to breakfast unwashed. In the clear light of day they were a rough, strangely a.s.sorted lot; only the older man, Graves, with his air of distinction and education, stood out from the rest, like a man-of-war among a flotilla of "tramps"--but a man-of-war that has been in battle and come out of it badly damaged.

"Rum go, our meeting again, like this," he said to Lawless, while they stood in the sunshine together and watched the others inspanning the mules. "I'd ask you to make a return call, only,"--he lifted his shoulders and smiled--"I'm a descendant of Cain--a wanderer upon the earth. I'll own my six feet some day, I suppose, and come to anchor."

Lawless glanced at the speaker with interest.

"I'm something of a rolling stone myself," he answered. "I doubt I shall ever lay claim to greater acreage than you."

"Ah!" Graves stroked the back of his head reflectively, and stared vaguely away into s.p.a.ce. "Failures!" he muttered... "Eh?... And to think of some of the fellows who're on top!"

"It's another form of selfishness, theirs," Lawless replied. "They've gone for the one thing, and stuck to it. A single idea would never satisfy either you or me. One man takes Wealth for his mistress; another, being polygamous, goes for a bevy of mistresses that we may bring under a common heading--Pleasure. The fool pursues Ambition, and the sentimentalist his Ideal... And when it comes to the finish--as Rentoul says--who shall say which man's skull it is he turns up?"

Graves nodded a.s.sent.

"And yet," he said--"a man's talents... It seems rotten things should pan out like that. I was never a white-haired boy exactly, but I had ideas once of doing something... Rot, of course--d.a.m.ned rot! And queer, too, how ideas run to seed before they fruit. I tell you a man needs to be ever on the alert, watching his ideas to prevent the growth exceeding the vitality. We don't prune and tend enough. We're so proud of our ideas that we let 'em run up rank and weedy, till they seed before time. It's the man with the strength of mind to nip the young shoots and exert patience who sees the fruition of his ideas."

"I confess I don't understand," said Lawless, "how you came to allow all yours to seed. With men like those," and he waved his hand in the direction of the swearing, noisy group hitching the mules to the disselboom with many loud and unnecessary oaths, "it's easy of comprehension. But--"

Graves filled in the pause with a laugh. "Ah well!" he returned...

"Who can say? The secret to the riddle lies in what you spoke of just now... I'm a polygamist."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Lawless stood in the sunshine and watched the departure of this strange aggregate of human limitation setting forth on its journey into the infinitudes. The clumsy waggon, drawn by its team of four mules, with the dirty faded hood of yellowish green shading the wain, b.u.mped and rumbled over the uneven ground. The jingling of the harness, the creaking of the heavy wheels, and the loud and too frequent cracking of the long whip, struck separate and not inharmonious notes of sound in the stillness of the morning air. And above these sounds a strong voice rang out heartily:

"Good-bye, Grit."

The men in the waggon started to sing, "_For he's a jolly good fellow_."

The rude music of their voices came back strongly to Lawless' ears, and then grew fainter, and yet more faint, until only the silence reigned about him, and the waggon showed smaller and smaller as it trailed slowly across the veld, farther and farther into the illimitable blue distance. Hayhurst had ridden off some time before, taking an opposite direction to that followed by the waggon. The occupant of the shanty was left alone. The world seemed to have emptied suddenly and to have overlooked himself in its indiscriminate sweeping away of all life.

He gazed about him at the solitudes--waste land on all sides, stretching away league upon league in one great sameness,--vast, unchanging open s.p.a.ces of veld, green and brown and orange, in which the yellow stones shone warmly in the sunshine, and the dew that lay heavily on the ground like a veil of silver flashed a prismatic defiance with the fire of myriads of gems.

He turned about and went into the house. The advent of these men had been unwelcome, their departure left a blank feeling of desolation behind. He had had as much of the solitudes as was good for him, he decided; if Van Bleit arrived, he would settle matters with him speedily and return to the beaten track. He felt depressed, and knew not that it was the influence of Graves' personality working upon his mind. This man who had stirred up thoughts of failure by his talk, who in his person stood for waste--the result of neither compet.i.tion nor intellectual incapacity, but of his own ineffectually--had set him thinking of the purposelessness of his life, its want of aim, of every high and right intention that once had actuated him, and which he had flung aside and trampled on in weak resentment against the tide of circ.u.mstances he had himself set loose and made no attempt to stem. He also stood for waste--the waste of powers which had left him stunted mentally and morally enervated. It is waste that is responsible for the world's great failures.

He made an effort to shake off the mood that held him, and moving across the littered room surveyed the disordered breakfast-table with disgust.

Empty bottles stood upon the table, and lay under it where they had been rolled the night before when they had yielded the last drop of their contents. They had been thirsty souls, these men who had happened out of the darkness and vanished again with the light,--failures, in a certain sense, each one of them,--a queer conglomerate of misdirected energy.

Lawless had a feeling that he ought to reduce the muddle to order, but he had only a vague idea how to set about it. He caught up the empty bottles, and going outside with them flung them out upon the veld.

"It's no use, Grit, playing Aunt Sally with those bottles. You can't hide your debauch from me."

He turned his face with a laugh and a look of quick relief in the direction of the voice, and there stood Tottie in her short tweed skirt, with a golden lock straggling rakishly over one eye, and her lips unusually pallid.

"You! G.o.ds! I'm glad," he cried.

"Don't stare at me like that," she exclaimed,--"look somewhere else, can't you? I won't have the eye of man upon me until I have attended to my toilet. There wasn't the vestige of a gla.s.s in the hut, you lunatic."

He followed her into the house.