No hitch-hikers please

Once while holidaying on the South Coast my father picked up a hitch-hiker.  If my mother had been with him, this would not have happened, as she had strictly forbidden my father to ever pick up any hitch-hikers, but sadly on this occasion she wasn't there to put her foot down with a firm hand.

My father was quite gregarious at times and almost always helpful when it came to strangers.  The young man had only been in the country for a short while, and my father taking pity on him, unwisely gave him our farm address. Imagine his surprise when a few weeks later, there on the doorstep stood his new best friend - the hitch-hiker, who eventually ended up staying for three years!

This was quite an interesting period for us, as farm life can be pretty lonely.  He played quite a nice game of tennis, a fair hand of bridge, and turned out to be a good riding companion for me.  He did however have stints of working in the metropolis of Johannesburg, as well as being able to wangle his way into numerous odd weeks spent on the farm. He often worked a double shift for a week by conning some poor fellow into working a corresponding double shift, thus enabling him to jump on a train, which deposited him at a station situated in the tiny town ten miles from our farm.  

He never did a single thing around the farm, except sleep, smoke, eat, ride, shoot, and make us laugh, especially my mother. The only time my father asked him to do something, which was to shoot the "sacrificial" Winter cow, he made such a bad job of it, that my father had to grab the gun from him in order to finish off the staggering animal.  

On occasion, he would go with my father to the local cattle sale.  This was a wonderful meeting place for all the farmers, who were just ordinary hard working individuals.  He came back from one of these sales, and told my mother that the only difference he could see between the speculators and the cattle, was that the speculators wore hats.  This had my mother rolling around.

One day three years from the time he rolled up, and without any warning, my father ordered him into the truck, threw his saddle into the back and dropped him off at the nearest cross roads.  I think he was as they would say in Afrikaans "gat vol", which is actually quite a rude term, but there you go. We never heard another peep from that quarter, but life then became a lot more uninteresting and we had to make do with one another's rather predictable boring company.  Ho Hum!