Dan spoke indistinctly, as a bullet had lately disarranged some of his teeth; but his words had a wonderful effect.

Each man began instinctively to tidy himself.  The would-be duellists, forgetting their quarrel, stuck the revolvers in their belts and followed the general example.  The Cripple hied him to the store, and after breaking down the door abstracted the only blacking-brush in the camp,—­putting down a sovereign on the counter in exchange for it,—­and set to polishing his high boots as if a fortune depended on their brightness.  The Scholar bought Herr Gustav’s white shirt for a fiver, threatening to murder its owner if he did not render it up.  And Partridge, a good man from Norfolk, with a regrettable weakness for shooting other people’s game, induced a friend to denude him of his flowing locks by means of a clasp-knife and a hunk of wood, as no scissors were procurable.

The wardrobes of Big Stone Hole were stocked more with a view to strict utility than variety or ornamentation, and the slender resources of the store utterly gave out under the sudden strain that was put upon them.  In every direction grimy, unkempt men might be seen attempting to beautify themselves.  Here was one enduring agonies from a razor that would scarcely whittle a stick; here another recalling the feel of a cake of soap; there a great fellow pulling faces as he struggled to get the teeth of a comb into his shock of hair; there another brushing the clay from his moleskin trousers with a tuft of stiff grass.

It seemed to these men ages since they had last seen a woman in the flesh,—­Kaffir women don’t count; they are not women, merely Kaffirs,—­and, with the natural instinct of males of every species, they set about pluming their feathers.

These operations, though speedy as might be, were necessarily prolonged, for most of the men required several buckets of water over the head before they felt fit for such unaccustomed exercises, and they were scarcely finished before the creaking of wheels and the cries of the voorlooper as he urged his oxen announced that the wagon was within earshot.  Up it came, the great tilt gleaming white in the moonlight, and every eye was fixed expectantly on the dark chasm within.  The driver, puffed up with his own importance, cracked his long whip and deigned not to notice the men whom he usually greeted with a friendly hail, and the Hottentot boy ahead, imitating his master, vouchsafed no explanation.  With more deathly slowness than usual did the lumbering vehicle crawl along until the tired cattle pulled up before the door of the American Bar.  Then there was a rush and a bit of a scuffle for the honour of handing the woman out.  The Cripple was the fortunate man, and, after assisting her to the ground, waved his tattered hat toward the gleaming open doorway.  But he did not speak.  Words were beyond him.  Indeed, the diggers, who were none of them particularly remarkable for taciturnity