What they said no one heard save themselves and the colonel. But when, thirty-two years later, Colonel Hardman (General Hardman by that time), was laid at rest beneath the elms of the quiet English churchyard of his native village, foremost among those who bore him to the grave walked, side by side with his famous son, Major Frederick Hardman, a stalwart, grey-haired, soldier-like man named Bob Burton, who had nursed the dying general, night and day, through the last hours of his final illness, and had felt amply repaid for all by the light of grateful affection that shone for a moment in the sunken eyes of his old enemy, just ere they settled into stillness for ever.
[IN LUCK'S WAY]
By FRED. WHISHAW
Matters were proceeding satisfactorily enough at Gerstonville, a farm lying some thirty miles north-east of Buluwayo, in Rhodesia. Richard Gerston had had the luck to peg out a fairly rich claim when, after the finish of the first Matabele war and the fall of old Lobengula, Buluwayo and the surrounding territories fell into the hands of the Company. Gerston had taken an honourable share in the fighting, and shared also in the privileges held out towards those who had been actively engaged in the war; and though his hopes—or dreams, as perhaps it would be more correct to call them—his dreams of finding gold upon his claim had not been realised, or had remained practically unrealised (for there were signs of gold here and there, though the precious metal had not been found in paying quantities), yet the soil was excellent, and his crops and his live-stock were doing wonders—so well indeed, that after a few months Gerston had felt justified in sending for his wife and two children from the Cape, where, for the present, they had remained waiting in anxious expectancy for the message which would enable them to start northwards in order to begin a new life in a new home in this new country.
For a year or two everything flourished. The farm had become a bit of England, though with African surroundings. Gerston's son Bruce, a lad of fifteen, was as much help to his father in the farm during working hours as his sister Kittie was to her mother in the house; while in the evening English outdoor games were the vogue; squash cricket especially, in which all the family took part, including Mrs. Gerston, who, however, according to the dictum of Bruce, "wasn't much good," and Kittie, who "played a much stronger game." Bruce had even attempted to teach a few Mashona labourers employed on the farm to wield the willow, but the result had been conspicuous failure; for not one of them displayed the smallest capacity for understanding the rules of the game, nor much inclination to run about or exert themselves after the fatigues of the day's work on the farm.
"Kittie, who played a much stronger game."
It was a beautiful summer's evening, during one of these games of "squash cricket," which was played on the rough turf outside the house, that a stranger strolled into the enclosure, an Englishman, though a hot and unkempt one, and stood still for a moment or two as his eye fell upon the unusual scene (in this part of the world) being enacted before him.