Meanwhile, peacefully unconscious of this diagnosis, Weldon was sitting on the river bank, prosaically occupied in scooping out the remaining taste left in an almost-empty jam tin.Beside him, Carew was similarly occupied.Two more jam tins were between them and, exactly opposite the pair of jam tins, there squatted a burly Kaffir, young, alert and crowned with a thatch of hair which by rights should have sprouted from the back of a sable pig.His mouth was slightly open, and now and then his tongue licked out, like the tongue of an eager dog.Aside from his hair, his costume consisted of one black sock worn in lieu of muffler and a worn pair of khaki trousers.
Behind him, the river caught the sunset light and turned it to a sheet of flowing copper; beyond stretched the open country in long, waving lines that ended in the deep yellow band of the afterglow.
Above them, the sky was blue; but it dropped from the blue zenith to the yellow horizon through every imaginable shade of emerald and topaz until all other shades lost themselves in one vivid blaze of burnt orange.It had been a day of intense heat.Already, however, the falling twilight and the inevitable eastward shift of the wind had brought the first hint of the evening chill.
Weldon shrugged his shoulders.
"Hurry up, Carew," he adjured his companion."I am for leaving our feast and hieing us back to the sanctuary.""Right, oh!" Carew raised his jam tin and took careful aim at a rock in mid stream.
Instantly the Kaffir hitched forward.
"Mine?" he demanded.
Carew stayed his arm.
"What for?"
"Eat.Um good."
"Nothing in there but atmosphere, sonny.You can get that out of any box.Suppose I can hit that little black point, Weldon?""Not if I know it," Weldon said coolly, as he tossed his own tin to the boy and, seizing that of Carew, threw it after its mate."Let the little coon have his lick, Carew.It's not pretty to watch him go at it, tongue first; but we can't all be Chesterfields.What is your name, sonny?"The boy paused with suspended tongue, while he rolled the great whites of his eyes up at the questioner.Then, the whites still turned upon Weldon, he took one more hasty lick.
"Kruger Roberts," he said then, detaching himself for an instant from his treasure."Oh, I infer you like to sit on fences?" Weldon said interrogatively.
"Ya, Boss."
"Which side do you intend to come down?"
"Me no come down," the boy answered nonchalantly, more from inherent indifference than from any comprehension of Weldon's allegory.
"All right.Stop where you are.Meanwhile, I think I should call you Jamboree.""Ya, Boss." The face vanished from sight behind the tilted tin.Then it reappeared, and a huge finger pointed to the remaining tins.
"Mine, too?"
But already the boy was forgotten.Weldon was following hard on the heels of the sentry who had dashed through the gate in the churchyard wall.
