Good-morning!" The handsome Boer, or Anglo-Boer, sat on his horse stroking his beautiful beard and gazing curiously after John Niel's sturdy English-looking figure as he marched towards the cart, for, of course, the wounded vilderbeeste had long ago vanished.
"I wonder," he said to himself aloud, as he turned his horse's head and rode leisurely away, "if the old _volk_ are right after all, and if there is a God." Frank Muller was sufficiently impregnated with modern ideas to be a free-thinker.

"It almost seems like it," he went on, "else how did it come that the one bullet passed under his belly and the other just touched his head without harming him?
I aimed carefully enough too, and I could make the shot nineteen times out of twenty and not miss.
Bah, a God! I snap my fingers at Him.

Chance is the only god.

Chance blows men about like the dead grass, till death comes down like the veldt fire and devours them.

But there are men who ride chance as one rides a young colt--ay, who turn its headlong rushing and rearing to their own ends--who let it fly hither and thither till it is weary, and then canter it along the road that leads to triumph.