#title The Last Bullet (Preview)
#subtitle The old hermit hated to do it, but when he died there would be no one to care for his dog. He raised the gun....
#author Stuart Cloete
#date
#source <[[https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn501848?rsc=112569&cv=3&x=1268&y=2139&z=3.6e-4][www.collections.ushmm.org]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-02-28T19:50:05
#topics hermits, fiction,
#notes Illustrated by Amos Sewell. This text was in the reading collection of the psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trials, Douglas M. Kelley, who sadly later committed suicide.

[[s-c-stuart-cloete-the-last-bullet-1.jpg][Old Jack held the fore sight between the dog’s eyes. “This is where we say good-by,” he said. The dog ...]]

THE old man walked into town every Saturday with a flour sack to buy his groceries—coffee, sugar, Boer meal, salt, cooking fat and a little bag of Boer tobacco.

He called it town, but it wasn’t really. It was a dorp, and a small one at that. Forty-odd houses, a store; a hotel rather larger than one would expect, because people came to Strumans Baai from Cape Town in the summer for the fishing, and apart from the bar trade, which was fair all the year round, commercial travelers on their rounds through the countryside used the place a lot. It was cheap, clean and the food was better than it is at most country hotels.

That was how Dick Winters had heard of the place. Quiet and cheap, a good place for a rest. Away from it all. And that was true enough. It was; and fed by a road that even in South Africa was considered second class. To hell and gone, the city slickers called it. In the wilds. Quiet, the others called it. Private, lonely—the adjectives depended on the guy. Anyway, there was a good beach of yellow sand bordered with old melk-bos trees, where you could bathe with nothing on. That sort of defines it. It’s been opened up since then. Developed. Now only the girls can bathe there nude, or nearly so, and a lot of the bush has been cut. But it was just the place to pick something up. He had a nose for things.

Dick Winters used to write a column for the old New York Express. The paper’d given him a kind of roving commission—trip round the world “and pick up what stories you can in out-of-the-way places.” He’d done Australia and India. He was in Africa now, on his way back. He was wondering if he’d been right about a story, when he saw an old chap coming down the road with a big red bull mastiff at his heels. When he stopped, the dog stopped, and they both stopped every few yards to greet someone, to take a look around or maybe just to rest, because the man was old—seventy-odd anyway—and the dog wasn’t young any more.

“If you …