Look, what a line of them there are, Baas.

One day I shall pay them all back again, Baas Frank." Muller abruptly dropped the stick, and followed John towards the house.
It was a much better building than the Boers generally indulge in, and the sitting-room, though innocent of flooring--unless clay and cowdung mixed can be called a floor--was more or less covered with mats made of springbuck skins.

In the centre of the room stood a table made of the pretty _buckenhout_ wood, which has the appearance of having been industriously pricked all over with a darning-needle, and round it were chairs and couches of stinkwood, and seated with rimpis or strips of hide.
In one big chair at the end of the room, busily employed in doing nothing, sat _Tanta_ (Aunt) Coetzee, the wife of Old Hans, a large and weighty woman, who evidently had once been rather handsome; and on the couches were some half-dozen Boers, their rifles in their hands or between their knees.
It struck John as he entered that some of these did not seem best pleased to see him, and he thought he heard one young fellow, with a hang-dog expression of face, mutter something about the "damned Englishman" to his neighbour rather more loudly than was necessary to convey his sentiments.

However, old Coetzee came forward to greet him heartily enough, and called to his daughters--two fine girls, very smartly dressed for Dutch women--to give the Captain a cup of coffee.
Then John made the rounds after the Boer fashion, and beginning with the old lady in the chair, received a lymphatic shake of the hand from every single soul in the room.

They did not rise--it is not customary to do so--they merely extended their paws, all of them more or less damp, and muttered the mystic monosyllable "_Daag_," short for good-day.