The Dop Doctor

d realized with a throe of mortal anguish that the burial must be soon--very soon. To prison what remained of her in a hastily knocked-together coffin, and drag it over the veld, looking for some plot of consecrated earth to put it in, was desecration, horror. He would bury her, and fetch the minister or clergyman or priest to read prayers. Later, if it cost him all he had, the spot should be consecrated for Christian burial. He came forth from the waggon and held parley with the landlord of the tavern. There was a wire-fenced patch of sandy red earth a hundred yards from the house, a patch wherein the white woman who was mistress at the tavern had tried to grow a few common English flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered packet left by a drummer who had passed that way. She had grown tired of the trouble of watering and tending them, so that some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had flown over the fence and scratched the rest up.

That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price, paid down in goo