



Produced by John Bickers; Dagny





JESS

By H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1887.




TO MY WIFE





JESS



CHAPTER I

JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE

The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still
know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is
broken--especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two, as
they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies--a variety of the
agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses--hung their
long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable, beneath
the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours like
the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway
that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt,
forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm, was
completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind
was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that
remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwinds,
which would suddenly spring up on the road itself, and twist and twirl
fiercely round, raising a mighty column of dust fifty feet or more into
the air, where it hung long after the wind had passed, and then slowly
dissolved as its particles floated to the earth.

Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of one of these
desultory and inexplicable whirlwinds, was a man on horseback. The man
looked limp and dirty, and the horse limper and dirtier. The hot wind
had "taken all the bones out of them," as the <DW5>s say, which was
not very much to be wondered at, seeing that they had been journeying
through it for the last four hours without off-saddling. Suddenly the
whirlwind, which had been travelling along smartly, halted, and the
dust, after revolving a few times in the air like a dying top, slowly
began to disperse in the accustomed fashion. The man on the horse halted
also, and contemplated it in an absent kind of way.

"It's just like a man's life," he said aloud to his horse, "coming from
nobody knows where, nobody knows why, and making a little column of dust
on the world's highway, then passing away, leaving the dust to fall to
the ground again, to be trodden under foot and forgotten."

The speaker, a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the
wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked
beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave
his jaded horse a tap with the _sjambock_ in his hand.

"Come on, Blesbok," he said, "or we shall never get to old Croft's place
to-night. By Jove! I believe that must be the turn," and he pointed with
his whip to a little rutty track that branched from the Wakkerstroom
main road and stretched away towards a curious isolated hill with a
large flat top, which rose out of the rolling plain some four miles to
the right. "The old Boer said the second turn," he went on still talking
to himself, "but perhaps he lied. I am told that some of them think it
is a good joke to send an Englishman a few miles wrong. Let's see, they
told me the place was under the lee of a table-topped hill, about half
an hour's ride from the main road, and that is a table-topped hill, so I
think I will try it. Come on, Blesbok," and he put the tired nag into
a sort of "tripple," or ambling canter much affected by South African
horses.

"Life is a queer thing," reflected Captain John Niel to himself as he
cantered along slowly. "Now here am I, at the age of thirty-four, about
to begin the world again as assistant to an old Transvaal farmer. It is
a pretty end to all one's ambitions, and to fourteen years' work in the
army; but it is what it has come to, my boy, so you had better make the
best of it."

Just then his cogitations were interrupted, for on the farther side of
a gentle <DW72> suddenly there appeared an extraordinary sight. Over the
crest of the rise of land, now some four or five hundred yards away, a
pony with a lady on its back galloped wildly, and after it