But I presoom you've been well paid, you dam gun-runnin'
Yank.'
"Well, Sir, I wasn't looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while
old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
"'Don't you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,' the man says. 'I know this
breed. The South's full of 'em.' Then he whirls round on me and says,
'Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King's neither here nor
there, but what _you've_ done,' he says, 'is to go back on the White Man
in six places at once--two hemispheres and four continents--America,
England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your
head,' he says. 'You know well if you'd been caught at this game in our
country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could
reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,' he says, 'and
you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.' And he threw
me half-a-crown--English money.
"Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must
have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one
rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but
the cold God's truth of the matter is--the money on the floor did it.... I
give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
"I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but
I dream about it. And it's Hell!
"How do you regard the proposition--as a Brother? If you'd invented your
own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her--and had paid your
own expenses from the word 'go'? An American citizen has a right to choose
his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite .
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