"YOU HAVE STRUCK A CHIEF."
"_Baleka_ [Run], you dogs!" cried Carhayes, who had taken the
opportunity of slipping a couple of fresh cartridges into his gun.
"_Baleka_, or I'll shoot the lot of you."
He looked as if he meant it, too. The Kafirs, deeming discretion the
better part of valour, judged it expedient to temporise.
"Don't shoot again, _Baas_! [Master.] You have already killed one
man!" they said significantly.
"And I'll kill four!" was the infuriated reply. "_Baleka_, do you
hear--quick--sharp--at once, or you're dead men!"
"Don't do anything so foolish, Tom," said a voice at his side, and a
hand was stretched out as though to arrest the aim of the threatening
piece. "For God's sake, remember. We are not at war--yet."
"That be hanged!" came the rough rejoinder. "Anyway, we'll give these
fellows a royal thrashing. We are two to three--that's good enough
odds. Come along, Eustace, and we'll lick them within an inch of their
lives."
"We'll do nothing of the sort," replied the other quietly and firmly.
Then, with an anxiety in his face which he could not altogether conceal,
he walked his horse over to the prostrate Kafir. But the latter
suddenly staggered to his feet. His left shoulder was streaming with
blood, and the concussion of the close discharge had stunned him. Even
his would-be slayer looked somewhat relieved over this turn which
affairs had taken, and for this he had to thank the plunging of his
horse, for it is difficult to shoot straight, even point blank, with a
restive steed beneath one, let alone the additional handicap of being in
a white rage at the time.
Of his wound the Kafir took not the smallest notice. He stood
contemplating the two white men with a scowl of bitter hatred deepening
upon his ochre-besmeared visage. His three countrymen halted irresolute
a little distance--a respectful distance, thought Carhayes with a
sneer--in the background, as though waiting to see if their assistance
should be required. Then he spoke:
"Now hear my words, you whom the people call Umlilwane. I know you,
even though you do not know me--better for you if you did, for then you
would not have wounded the sleeping lion, nor have aroused the anger of
the hooded snake, who is swift to strike. Ha! I am Hlangani," he
continued, raising his voice to a perfect roar of menace, and his eyes
blazed like live coals as he pointed to the shot wounds in his shoulder,
now black and hideous with clotted blood. "I am Hlangani, the son of
Ngcesiba, a man of the House of Gcaleka. What man living am I afraid
of? Behold me here as I stand. Shoot again, Umlilwane--shoot again, if
you dare. _Hau_! Hear my `word.' You have slain my dog--my white
hunting dog, the last of his breed--who can outrun every other hunting
dog in the land, even as the wind outstrippeth the crawling ox-wagon,
and you have shed my blood, the blood of a chief. You had better first
have cut off your right hand, _for it is better to lose a hand than
one's mind_. This is my `word,' Umlilwane--bear it in memory, _for you
have struck a chief_--a man of the House of Gcaleka."
[Umlilwane: "Little Fire"--Kafirs are fond of bestowing nicknames. This
one referred to its bearer's habitually short temper.]
"Damn the House of Gcaleka, anyway," said Carhayes, with a sneer as the
savage, having vented his denunciation, stalked scowlingly away with his
compatriots. "Look here, _isidenge_," [fool], he continued. "This is
my word. Keep clear of me, for the next time you fall foul of me I'll
shoot you dead. And now, Eustace," turning to his companion, "we had
better load up this buck-meat and carry it home. What on earth is the
good of my trying to preserve the game, with a whole location of these
black scum not ten miles from my door?" he went on, as he placed the
carcase of the unfortunate steinbok on the crupper of his horse.
"No good. No good, whatever, as I am always telling you," rejoined the
other decisively, "Kafir locations and game can't exist side by side.
Doesn't it ever strike you, Tom, that this game-preserving mania is
costing you--costing us, excessively dear."
"Hang it. I suppose it is," growled Carhayes. "I'll clear out, _trek_
to some other part of the country where a fellow isn't overrun by a lot
of worthless, lazy, red Kafirs. I wish to Heaven they'd only start this
precious war. I'd take it out of some of their hides. Have some better
sport than buck-hunting then, eh?"
"Perhaps. But there may be no war after all. Meanwhile you have won
the enmity of every Kafir in Nteya's and Ncanduku's locations. I
wouldn't give ten pounds for our two hundred pound pair of breeding
ostriches, if it meant leaving them here three days from now, that's
all."
"Oh, shut up croaking, Eustace," snarled Carhayes, "And by the way, who
the deuce is this sweep Hlangani, and what is he doing on this side of
the river anyway?"
"He's a Gcaleka, as he said, and a petty chief under Kreli; and the
Gaikas on this side are sure to take up his quarrel. I know them."
"H'm. It strikes me you know these black scoundrels rather well,
Eustace. What a queer chap you are. Now, I wonder what on earth has
made you take such an interest in them of late."
"So do I. I suppose, though, I find them interesting, especially since
I have learned to talk with them pretty easily. And they are
interesting. On the whole, I like them."
Carhayes made no reply, unless an inarticulate growl could be construed
as such, and the two men rode on in silence. They were distant cousins,
these two, and as regarded their farming operations, partners. Yet
never were two men more utterly dissimilar. Carhayes, the older by a
matter of ten years, was just on the wrong side of forty--but his
powerfully built frame was as tough and vigorous as in the most
energetic days of his youth. He was rather a good looking man, but the
firm set of his lips beneath the thick, fair beard, and a certain
shortness of the neck, set forth his choleric disposition at first
glance. The other was slightly the taller of the two, and while lacking
the broad, massive proportions of his cousin, was straight, and well set
up. But Eustace Milne's face would have puzzled the keenest character
reader. It was a blank. Not that there was aught of stupidity or
woodenness stamped thereon. On the contrary, there were moments when it
would light up with a rare attractiveness, but its normal expression was
of that impassibility which you may see upon the countenance of a priest
or a lawyer of intellect and wide experience, whose vocation involves an
intimate and profoundly varied acquaintance with human nature in all its
chequered lights and shades; rarely, however, upon that of one so young.
From the high ridge on which the two men were riding, the eye could
wander at will over the rolling, grassy plains and mimosa-dotted dales
of Kaffraria. The pure azure of the heavens was unflecked by a single
cloud. The light, balmy air of this early spring day was as
invigorating as wine. Far away to the southeast the sweep of undulating
grass land melted into an indistinct blue haze--the Indian Ocean--while
in the opposite direction the panorama was barred by the hump-like
Kabousie Heights, their green slopes alternating with lines of dark
forest in a straggling labyrinth of intersecting kloofs. Far away over
the golden, sunlit plains, the white walls of a farmhouse or two were
discernible, and here and there, rising in a line upon the still
atmosphere, a column of grey smoke marked the locality of many a distant
kraal lying along the spurs of the hills. So still, so transparent,
indeed, was the air that even the voices of their savage inhabitants and
the low of cattle floated faintly across the wide and intervening space.
Beneath--against the opposite ridge, about half a mile distant, the red
ochre on their clothing and persons showing in vivid and pleasing
contrast against the green of the hillside, moved ten or a dozen
Kafirs--men, women, and children. They stepped out in line at a brisk,
elastic pace, and the lazy hum of their conversation drifted to the ears
of the two white men so plainly that they could almost catch its burden.
To the younger of these two men the splendid vastness of this
magnificent panorama, framing the picturesque figures of its barbarous
inhabitants, made up a scene of which he never wearied, for though at
present a Kaffrarian stock farmer, he had the mind of a thinker, a
philosopher, and a poet. To the elder, however, there was nothing
noteworthy or attractive about it. We fear he regarded the beautiful
rolling plains as so much better or worse _veldt_ for purposes of
stock-feeding, and was apt to resent the continued and unbroken blue of
the glorious vault above as likely to lead to an inconvenient scarcity
of rain, if not to a positive drought. As for the dozen Kafirs in the
foreground, so far from discerning anything poetical or picturesque
about them, he looked upon them as just that number of black scoundrels
making their way to the nearest canteen to get drunk on the proceeds of
the barter of skins flayed from stolen sheep--his own sheep among those
of others.
As if to emphasise this last idea, cresting the ridge at that moment,
they came in sight of a large, straggling flock. Straggling indeed! In
twos and threes, in clumps of a dozen, and in clumps of fifty, the
animals, though numbering but eleven hundred, were spread over nearly
two miles of _veldt_. It was the flock in charge of the defaulting and
contumacious Goniwe, who, however, having caught a glimpse of the
approach of his two masters, might be descried hurriedly collecting his
scattered charges. Carhayes ground his teeth.
"I'll rip his black hide off him. I'll teach him to let the sheep go to
the devil while he hunts our bucks." And gripping his reins he drove
his spurs into his horse's flanks, with fell intent toward the offending
Kafir.
"Wait--wait!" urged the more prudent Eustace. "For Heaven's sake, don't
give yourself away again. If you must lick the boy, wait until you get
him--and the sheep--safe home this evening. If you give him beans now,
its more than likely he'll leave the whole flock in the _veldt_ and
won't come back at all--not forgetting, of course, to drive off a dozen
or two to Nteya's location."
There was reason in this, and Carhayes acquiesced with a snarl. To
collect the scattered sheep was to the two mounted men a labour of no
great difficulty or time, and with a stern injunction to Goniwe not to
be found playing the fool a second time, the pair turned their horses'
heads and rode homeward.