The Golden Rock

Old Trader Hume was dead. Not that he was really old when he died, but he had lived a life that had robbed him of his youth at one end and cut off the slow decline on the other. At fifteen he began the career of trader and hunter; before twenty he had been tossed by a buffalo, and broken his leg in a fall from his horse; at twenty-five he had been twice down with the fever; at thirty he was known as Old Hume; at fifty he had gone home to die—a man worn, sun-dried, and scarred with many wounds. Home to the Old Country, the land of his parents, the land of rest and green fields that had figured in his waking dreams, and in his lonely watches beneath the African sky.