Kitabı oku: «The Outspan: Tales of South Africa», sayfa 6

Heron looked up curiously, but did not interrupt.

“It seems he’s quite a great gun among the niggers – a real Induna. Did you know that? I thought it was only a nickname, but it isn’t. He’s a sort of relation of the king’s, etc.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“Eh? what? A – a relation of the king’s, I said.”

“A relation! Nairn?”

“Well, a connection. You know what I mean. He married the king’s favourite daughter.”

“Great God!”

“Yes. You see, we were quite on the wrong tack. By George! I did laugh when I heard it.”

Heron walked out on to the gravel path for a breath of air – out to ease the choking feeling in his throat; and he saw his sister rise from her chair, draw a shawl over her head, and move away to her own room.

That night there had come to the house a little Swazie boy. He had one very miserable fowl for sale, and he squatted on his haunches near the gate, heedless of the fact that his offer had been twice refused. Through the night he stayed, and into the morning, and as the hot sun swung overhead he sat and waited still, never taking his eyes off the front stoep. And when at last Kate came out he tried his luck again.

She turned her armchair so as to get a good light on her book, and began to read, but in a few moments the child’s voice close by startled her. She looked up and saw a little black face, lighted by bright eyes and a flash of white teeth; in front of that, a wretched fowl lying on the cement stoep; and in front of that again, a folded note bearing her name. She picked up the note and read it.

“I had forgotten what a good woman was. Heaven bless you, Kate! It is not that I am ungrateful, but I wish to God Piet had left me to the river.”

Kate leaned back quietly in the Madeira armchair, and closed her eyes. When she looked again the little umfaan was gone; but he had forgotten his fowl upon the stoep, which was an unusual thing for any umfaan to do.

Chapter Four.
Cassidy

“And the greatest of these is charity.”

I met Cassidy under trying circumstances. But it worked out all right eventually, principally because, so far as I knew him – and that got to be pretty well – Cassidy was not amenable to circumstances. He beat them mostly, and some of them were pretty tough.

The circumstances surrounding our meeting were trying, because Cassidy was in bed after a hard day’s work, and I aroused him at 3 a.m. by firing a revolver at his bulldog. His huts were on the railway works, and near the footpath to Jim Mackay’s canteen – a pretty hot show. He used to be roused this way every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally throughout the week, by visitors, black and white, warlike and friendly, thieving and sociable, but all drunk. At first he got a bulldog, but they got to know him, and after awhile the tip went round that half a pound of beefsteak was a good buy and better than a blunderbuss for Cassidy’s Cutting. Then he loaded fifty Number 12’s with coarse salt, mixed with pebbles and things, and, as he said to me afterwards:

“Ye were the fourth that night, and ye ’noyed me wid yer swearin’ an’ shootin’ an’ that, so I just passed the salt an’ wint for the dust shot as bein’ more convincing like; but the divil an’ all of it was, I couldn’t get the cartridge in by reason of drawin’ the charge that was there already. Too bad! too bad! for dust shot it was, av I’d only known it, an’ me thinkin’ it was nothin’ but salt. Lord, Lord! we’re a miscontented lot! Av it wasn’t for bein’ greedy, I’d ’ve had ye wid the dust shot safe as death. Faith, ye niver know yer luck!”

That was all right from his point of view, but as I had left my horse dying of Dikkop sickness just this side of Kilo 26, and had walked along the formation carrying saddle and bridle up to Kilo 43 – about ten miles – without a drink, and twice lost my way between unconnected sections, and twice walked over the ends of the formation where culverts should have been and rolled down twenty feet of embankment, and once got bogged in a bottoming pit in a vlei, and many times hacked my shins against wheelbarrows and piles of picks stacked on the track, I think it was reasonable to let out at a bulldog that came at me like a hurricane out of the darkness and silence of 3 a.m. in the Bush veld, to say nothing of a half-finished railway cutting. And I think it only human to have cursed the owner with all my resources until the dog was called off.

I don’t exactly know how it came about, but I slept in Cassidy’s hut that night. He pushed me in before him, guiding me to the bed with a hand on each elbow. He said that there were no matches in the show and that it wasn’t worth while looking for the candle, which, as he had no means of lighting it, I suppose it wasn’t.

He had a rare brogue and a governing nasal drone, but it was the brogue that emboldened me to ask for whisky.

“Spirits!” said he; “not a drop, an’ niver have; but jist sit ye where ye are, an’ I’ll fetch ye out some beer – Bass’s, no less, av ye’ll thry that; and can dhrink from the bottle.”

He talked in jerks, and had a quaint knack of chucking remarks after an apparently completed sentence, evidently intending them to catch up to it and be tacked on. He dived under the bed somewhere, and a minute later I heard the squeaking of a corkscrew and the popping of a cork.

“Here y’ are,” said he, as he pressed the bottle into my two hands; “drink hearty, me lad, and praise yer God Dan O’Connell there’s got too fat an’ lazy to pull ye down.”

I dare say he knew what he was talking about, but, for my part, I confess that nothing in the whole business had impressed me less than any lack of earnestness on Dan O’Connell’s part. I sat awhile munching biscuits from a tin which he had placed on the table and gurgling down beer from the bottle. Cassidy was asleep. Ten minutes passed, and I was finishing the beer, when he sat up again, as I judged from the sound, and remarked in a brisk, clear tone:

“Ye called me a mud-dollopin’, dyke-diggin’, Amsterdam’d Dutchman! Ye’ll take back the Dutchman, I believe?”

“I will indeed,” I said, laughing.

“An’ the mud?”

“Yes, and the mud.”

He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt:

“Mud, sez he, mud! An’ me shiftin’ granite boulders for soft rock, an shtruck solid formation a fut from surface, an’ getting two an’ six a cubic fer the lot! Mud, faith! An’ not enough water this three miles to the Crocodile to make spit for an ant, barrin’ what I can tap from the Figaro Battery pipe! An’ mud, sez he? Holy Fly! Mud, be Gawd!”

It died away in a sleepy grunt, and Cassidy was off I groped about for a blanket, and, rolling back into the meal-sack stretcher, forgot all about mad Irishmen, sick horses, and earnest bulldogs.

One always experiences a curious sensation on seeing by daylight that which one has only known in the dark. Persons do for years a certain journey or voyage, always starting and always arriving at regular hours. One day something happens which necessitates their passing in daylight the places formerly passed at night. On such occasions even the most matter-of-fact must marvel at the wanton freaks of their imaginations. The real thing seems so inconceivably wrong after what the mind had pictured. The appearance of a room, the outside of a house, are ludicrously, hopelessly at variance with what one had thought they should be. But it is, if possible, worse when the subject is a person. I have many times travelled with men at night by coach, on horseback, on foot, and in a waggon; have chatted sociably and exchanged all manner of friendly turns; have slept at the same wayside hotel, and in the morning found myself unable, until he spoke, to pick out of any two the one with whom I had spent hours the night before.

In the case of Cassidy the difference was appalling.

I awoke in such light as might leak through the grass hut; which was very little for light, but not bad for leakage.

The boy brought breakfast – coffee, bread, and cold venison, which suited me well – and I was turning my thoughts to the matter of a fresh horse for my homeward journey when I met the eye of one of my friends of the previous night. I say the eye, because I don’t count the one in the black patch – I couldn’t see it. But when Dan O’Connell stood in the doorway and allowed his one bloodshot, pink-rimmed eye to rest thoughtfully on me, it fairly fixed me. I used to recall his bandy legs and undershot jaw long afterwards whenever I thought of Cassidy’s Cutting; but it was only when the luminous eye uprose before me that I used unconsciously to twitch about and draw my legs up as I did the morning I saw him in the flesh. Cassidy was a surprise; O’Connell wasn’t. His appearance was only the cold chill of proof following a horrible conviction. I was much relieved when the boy cleared Dan out of the doorway with a bare-toed kick in the ribs and a vigorous “Ow! Foosack!” I admired the boy for that, and even envied him.

Through the open doorway I saw a white man walking briskly towards the hut, and I stepped out to meet him. He was a man of medium height, but there was something in his walk and figure that arrested attention. I am sure I have never seen in any man such lithe, active movement and perfect symmetry. A close-fitting vest and a pair of white flannel trousers were what he wore. I remember that because, somehow, I always recall that first view in the morning light – the springy walk, the bare muscular arms, the curve of the chest, and the poise of the head, as the face was turned from me.

If I could tell this story without saying another word about his appearance, I would stop right here. I would greatly prefer to do so, but it is not possible. I hope no one will feel exactly as I felt when this man turned his face to me. It serves no good purpose to give revolting details, so I will only say that the man was disfigured – most horribly so.

I cannot recall what was said or done during the few minutes that passed after we met, but there are some impressions seared into my brain as with red-hot irons; there are some recollections which even now make me feel faint and dazed, and some which make me burn with shame. I take shame – bitter, burning shame – that I failed to grasp his outstretched hand, and that I let him read in my face the horror that seized me. It is one of those pitiful things that the longest lifetime is not long enough to let a man forget. Surging across this comes the vivid recollection of my conviction that this man was Cassidy. The first instant my glance lighted on him I felt what I can only call a sort of joyous conviction that it was he. I felt, in fact, that I recognised him. No doubt it seems odd, illogical, contradictory, even impossible, that, strong as the gratifying conviction was, the other, when he turned his face to me, was a thousand times stronger. It ought to have been a reversal of the first conviction. It wasn’t. It was a smashing, terrible corroboration. It crushed me with a sense of personal affliction. It never germinated a doubt.

I had to stay all that day with him, and he was most gentle and courteous; most kindly and considerate. Every act heaped coals of fire on my ill-conditioned head. God knows I tried my best, but I could hardly look in his face, and I could not control my physical repugnance. I schooled myself to speak, and even to look, without betraying my thoughts, but I could not eat with him. I could not sit opposite a face half of which was gone; I could not use the plate, the cup, the fork, that he had used. I pleaded illness, and feigned it; but by night-time I was ill enough to need no feigning.

It was common enough for anyone benighted on those unhealthy flats to pay the penalty with a dose of fever. I got fever, and no one seemed surprised; but for the life of me I cannot even now help attaching some significance to the fact that I was certainly not ill before the scene at the hut door.

I lay in that grass hut for a week or more, some of the time delirious – all the time panting with fever and shivering with ague; tossing wakefully and gasping for air; complaining of everything, unutterably miserable and despondent; hating the sight of food, shrinking from each act of kindness, scowling at the sound of a voice. My case was not worse than hundreds of others. I mention these things only to make clear what I mean when I say that never at any moment during that time did I awake or want anything but Cassidy was there to tend me. His was the care, the watchfulness, the gentleness, of a good woman. Can one say more?

It is odd that during that time I only saw him as he ought to have been – as I am sure at one time he had been – a man whose countenance matched his character. It is not so odd, perhaps, that as I recovered and became rational the feeling of repulsion did not return, only an infinite pity for a hardly-stricken fellow-creature whose physical endowments and whose prospects must have been far above the average, and whose affliction was proportionately great.

When I left there was one feeling that was stronger than simple gratitude to him. It was thankfulness that something had occurred to prevent me from leaving with only horror and repulsion. I was thankful for the sickness that left me richer by a heart full of pity and – I think the right word is – reverence!

My lines were laid in other places than Cassidy’s, and as months passed by without my either seeing or hearing of him, I might, for aught I know, have forgotten him, or come to recall him only as one recalls, after lapse of years, some curious experience. This might have happened, I say; but it didn’t. Mainly because of a conversation which revived my keenest interest in him.

Several of us had walked out to dine and spend the evening at the Chaunceys’, and as we sat on the stoep smoking and chatting, the ladies being with us, the conversation turned on a concert or entertainment of some kind which was being got up for the relief of some distressed families in the place. Somebody hazarded the opinion that the “distressed family” business was being somewhat overdone, and that there was no evidence of it as far as he had been able to see.

The remark was unfortunate, for Mrs Chauncey happened to be one of the promoters of the charity. She – good little woman! – had her young matron’s soul full of sympathy still; her store had not been plundered by impostors, and she vehemently defended her project. She did more; she carried war and rout into the enemy’s quarters and surmised that men, young men, whose lives are divided between money-making and pleasure-seeking, are not the best judges of what those who keep their troubles to themselves may have to endure.

“When you,” (the young men) “are settling differences on shares or cards, or having your occasional splits – or whatever else you do all day long – there are women and children aching for one good meal, shrinking back for want of ordinary clothing, languishing and dropping for want of a man’s arm to fend and support them.”

Jack Chauncey – good chap! – must have thought this from his wife just a wee bit spirited, for, after a pause, he gently drew a herring across the trail.

“By – the – by, dear,” he asked thoughtfully, “what became of that good-looking young widow who came here with her kid and looked so jolly miserable? By Gad! her face has been haunting me ever since. Did you manage anything for her?”

“You mean Mrs Mallandane. She would not take anything. She wanted to work; to earn, not to beg, she said. I have managed to get her some needlework, but, oh, so little, poor thing! And the pay is too dreadful! Now, there is a case in point. A widow, absolutely penniless, with a child of four or five to support. A woman of education and breeding, without a friend in the world, apparently; shunned by everyone – by some on account of her poverty, by others for her good looks and reserve. She certainly is difficult to approach. I have been to her now four times, and it was only on the last occasion that she thawed enough to tell me anything of herself. She has lived for years on what she believed to be the proceeds of her husband’s estate. Until within the last few months she was under this impression. But something happened which made her suspicious, and she found out that the income left by her husband was pure fiction, and that what she had been living on was an allowance from the only real friend she or her husband ever had – the man who was her husband’s partner when he died.”

“Does she say that her husband is dead?” asked Carter, the unfortunate “young man” who had before provoked Mrs Chauncey’s ire.

Carter was very young, and I could see that he had no arrière pensée in asking that question. He did not mean to be impertinent. But I could also see that Mrs Chauncey did not take that view. Her little iced reply finished poor Carter.

“I said that she was a widow, Mr Carter, and I do not care to make another’s misfortunes the subject of an argument.”

I felt sorry for Carter, he was such an ass; and I believe the other two fellows pitied him also; so we did not refer to the subject as we walked home together in the moonlight. That, however, did not suit Carter. After awhile he gave an uncomfortable laugh, and said:

“The little woman was rather down on me to-night about the charity show. I rather put my foot in it, I think.”

“Think!” said Lawton (one of our party), with heavy contempt. “Think! I wonder you claim to be able to think! I never in my life saw anyone make such a blighted idiot of himself!”

“Dash it all, man! give me a chance. The ‘distressed family’ allusion was unlucky, I admit; but I hadn’t the faintest intention of returning to the subject when I asked about the husband. Man alive! Why, the nerve of the Mallandane woman fairly knocked the breath out of me. The cheek of her cramming poor Mrs Chauncey with yarns of her husband’s death and estate, when everyone knows that he isn’t dead at all; that she gave him the slip, and went off with the ‘only friend’ – his partner! A man with half his face eaten away by disease. I’ve seen the fellow at the house myself Old Larkin, of the Bank, knew them in Kimberley. They were claim-holders and contractors there and used to bank with him. The firm was Cassidy and Mallandane. I only wonder she continues to call herself Mallandane. It’s a formality she might as well have dispensed with.”

I knew Carter to be a gossipy young devil, so I held my peace about Cassidy; but it was with an effort. My impulse was to give Carter the lie direct, but I remembered Mrs Chauncey’s last words and refrained.

We walked along in silence, and after a while Carter stopped in the road opposite a small house, the door of which stood partly open. There were voices outside, and as Carter said, “Hush! listen!” we stopped instinctively, and my heart sank as I recognised a voice that said “Good-night.” I moved on hastily, disgusted at being trapped into eavesdropping, and Carter laughed.

“That’s the only friend! There’s no mistaking that. But I wonder why he’s coming away,” said the youth, with unmistakable and insinuating emphasis on the last words.

No one answered his self-satisfied cackling. I was listening to the brisk walk behind us. I would have known it in a million. Closer and closer it came; his sleeve brushed mine as he stepped lightly past. I let him go, and I don’t know why. But I felt like a whipped cur for doing it.

It seemed to me that I must heretofore have been living in extraordinary ignorance of what was going on round about me in a small place; for, as though it only needed the start, from the first mention of this story by Carter I was always hearing it, or a similar one, or one half corroborating it.

I made an effort to see Cassidy the first thing next morning, but he had left his hotel – presumably having gone out to the works again. After a day or two had passed I felt glad that I had not met him – glad because I felt sure that he would have noticed that there was something wrong. He would instinctively have detected the cordiality and confidence which were controlled by an effort of will, and were not – as they should have been, and as they did again become – spontaneous and real.

This worried me exceedingly and I turned it over and over again to get at the truth, and eventually it came to this. I knew that they were right as to the cause of his disfigurement; it was impossible to look at him and not accept it. I had no high moral prejudices about this. I only pitied him the more. But I did not believe a word of the rest of the story. All presumption and a heap of circumstances were against me, but I am glad to say that, but for the first hesitation, I never, never doubted him.

It may have been a week or two after this that I met Mrs Chauncey in camp one afternoon. I had not seen her since the evening already referred to, and, as it was an off afternoon, I asked leave to join her in her walk home.

We wandered on slowly through the outskirts of the camp, along the most direct road to the Chaunceys’ house. Since I had heard and seen what I had that evening my interest in Mrs Mallandane had increased. I never passed the house without looking. I claim – even to myself – that it was real interest and not curiosity that prompted me. Once or twice I had seen the figure in simple black, but not sufficiently clearly to have known the face again. Her figure I don’t think I should have mistaken; it was rather striking. There was also a little girl who used to sit under a mimosa-tree studying her lessons or doing sums on a slate. She and I became friends. I was drawn to the youngster because, when passing one day, I took the unwarrantable liberty of looking over her shoulder to see what the sum was. After a decent pause, during which I might have taken the hint, she turned up at me a very serious little face lighted by large blue eyes, and lisped slowly:

“I don’t like people to thtand behind, becauth I fordet my thums.”

I laughingly patted the little head, and went on; but after this I always stopped to chaff my little friend about her “thums,” and I generally brought an offering of some sort – sweets, cake, or fruit.

Thinking of the house and its people as we walked along, I was not sorry when Mrs Chauncey asked if I would mind waiting for a minute or two while she went in to see her protégée about some work secured or promised.

I sat down in my little friend’s seat and waited. I had not long to wait. Presently I heard behind me the awkward tiptoeing of a child trying to walk very silently. Like Brer Rabbit, I lay low. Then came the climbing on to the seat, and finally a pair of childish hands were clapped over my eyes to an accompaniment of half-suppressed squeals of laughter, broken by panting efforts to maintain the blind-folding hug. I was busily keeping up the illusion by extravagantly bad guesses as to who it was, when I heard the rustle of a dress, and someone ran out, calling:

“Molly, Molly! how can you be so naughty, darling? Oh, do excuse her!”

I was released. My hat was in the dust and my hair rumpled. I saw Mrs Chauncey in the background in peals of laughter; Mrs Mallandane before me, looking most concerned, and holding the bewildered Molly by the hand; and Molly vindicating herself by saying with much dignity:

“Mother, it’s only the gentimell that dooth my thumth an’ kitheth me.”

As a defence this was, of course, adequate – not to say excellent; but it was rather embarrassing for me. It was so effective, however, that I was spared the necessity of saying anything myself Mrs Chauncey introduced me to her protégée as she would have done to any of her lady friends, and the protégée bowed, as it seemed to me, with a great deal more grace and quite as much easy composure as the best of them. That was my first thought. The next was to take myself indignantly to task for instituting a comparison.

As we resumed our walk I was wondering what could be the tie between this woman and Cassidy. There was no mistaking her class. She was a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. I was roused from my rather discourteous distraction by Mrs Chauncey saying:

“You are not so surprised now, perhaps, that I lost my temper with Mr Carter the other evening. I am sorry I spoke as I did, but I felt it deeply – indeed I did.”

“I can well understand it,” I answered. “How do you like her?” she asked abruptly. “What! after on interview of two minutes – and such an interview?”

Mrs Chauncey smiled, and said: “Well, I only wanted to know your impression. And, after all, you have had time to form one, for you have been thinking of her all the time since we left the house!”

“Perfectly true – I have. And to speak candidly, I think I have seldom – indeed, I think, never – seen a face that interested me more; partly, I suppose, because of what you told us. And I don’t think I have ever seen anyone look so infinitely sad. It is a pitiful, haunting face.”

“I feel that also. I have never been able to forget her look since she came to me a month ago for work – needlework or any work. I will never believe that she could be an impostor. No, no! Truth is stamped in her face – truth and sorrow.”

I had always liked Mrs Chauncey. Just at that moment I was mentally patting her on the back and calling her “a little brick,” for it was clear that she too had heard something – heard it and passed it by. Good woman!

I was a bachelor, and not too old to feel; and, over and above my interest in Cassidy, this whole affair fascinated me considerably. From this time forward I never passed the house without greeting mother or child with sincere warmth, or missing them with an equally genuine sense of disappointment. I never met Mrs Chauncey without inquiring with interest the latest news of her friend and all details of her affairs.

There was never much to tell. Now it was some commission for a dress, now the mending of children’s clothes – another time the trimming of hats or working a tennis-net, that helped to make ends meet without hurt to her pride. These were petty details which might pass in woman’s chat, but should fail to interest a man, you would think. Nevertheless, they interested me. They did more. In the evenings, as I sat alone and smoked out in the starlight they helped me to conjure up pictures and to see her as she would at those very moments, perhaps, be employed.

I would have done anything to help her had I been able, but there was nothing I could do. I had even learned that I might not as much as evince sympathy or interest, except at the cost of insult to her. On one occasion when I happened to meet and walk with her in one of the main streets of the camp, I was frigidly cut by two ladies with whom I thought I was on quite friendly terms. This disturbed me considerably, not on my own account, but because of the insult and injustice to one who was powerless to resent it. It hurt me even more to realise that it would be wise to bow before this and prove greater friendship by showing less.

I was still smarting under this next morning when I was accosted by one of those puddle-headed, blundering idiots of whom there seem to be one or more in any community, no matter how small.

“I say, old chap,” he began, “look here, ye know! You’re not playin’ the game, ye know, old chap! The missis has been complainin’ to me about you. You know what I mean.”

I detest this “dontcherknow,” “g”-dropping kind of animal at any time – the thing that fondles you with “old chap” and “dear boy” and refers to its wife as “the missis.” But apart from this, I was to-day especially unprepared to submit to further outrage. I was still smarting, as I said before.

“My good man,” I said, “may I ask you to be more explicit?”

“Why, dash it all, old chap! you know what I mean – er. It’s no affair of mine, of course, if you only keep it quiet, don’t you know. But you don’t give one a chance, don’t you know; and, after all, you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know!”

I was trying to keep my temper, but with no very marked success, I fear; but I said as calmly as I could:

“That’s a very original remark, my friend, and no doubt equally intelligent, but I shall be pleased if you will be good enough to apply it so that I can understand it.”

“Look here, old chap. If you will go and walk in broad daylight with a woman like that, you know – well, you can’t expect – ”

“Stop now!” I said. I had hardly breath enough to speak, and there must have been something unpleasant in my face, for he stepped back a pace or two. “So far you are only a babbling fool. If you go on now you will be an infernal cad and must take the consequences. You understand what I mean. And further, as you have been good enough to hint that I should choose my line, I may tell you – to adopt your happy illustration – that I elect to ‘run with the hare.’ You see! Perhaps you understand what I mean!”

Now, before two minutes had passed, I did not need anyone to tell me that I had done the worst and most unwise thing possible under the circumstances. Of course I knew well enough that when a woman is concerned two things are very essential – that the man shall keep his temper, and that he shall be judicious, even circumspect, in defending. Having failed in the former, I necessarily failed in the latter, and I felt sick with impotent rage when I realised it.

I knew how the story would circulate, and I knew exactly how it would be touched up, amplified, and illustrated with graphic gesticulations when it reached the club and Exchange and passed through the hands of certain expert raconteurs; and to avoid the lamentable result of chaff and further provocation I got away for a couple of days to give myself – and the story – a chance.

Several weeks passed after this incident, during which I saw but little of Mrs Mallandane, and heard not much more. Occasionally I heard of Cassidy from men coming up the line. In spite of his grumbling and seeming discontent with the nature of the country in his section nobody believed that Cassidy’s Cutting was such a very unprofitable job as he gave out. Cassidy was too old a hand to be drawn into any admission which could be used against him for the purpose of cutting down prices in future contracts. Those best able to judge put him down to make close on 10,000 pounds out of that job. His section lay some sixty miles from Barberton, and, as far as I knew, he had been into camp only twice during the five months that had passed since I had first met him. One occasion was the night on which I had seen him; the other when he called at the office to see me. I was out of camp that day and missed him. I do not know how often he may have been in besides those two occasions.