He looked and saw the Basutos, fifty or more of them, arriving, just too late.

“Who are these?” he asked.

“They are the people of Sekukuni whom you should know well enough.  They have hunted us all night, yes, and before, seeking to murder us; also they have stolen our oxen, thirty-two fine oxen which I give to your king if he can take them back.  Now perhaps you understand why we dared the Crocodile River in its rage.”

At the name of Sekukuni the man, who it seemed was the captain of some border guards, stiffened all over like a terrier which perceives a rat.  “What!” he exclaimed, “do these dirty Basuto dogs dare to carry spears so near our country?  Have they not yet learned their lesson?”

Then he rushed into the water, shaking an assegai he had snatched up, and shouted,

“Bide a while, you fleas from the kaross of Sekukuni, till I can come across and crack you between my thumb and finger.  Or at the least wait until Macumazahn has time to get his rifle.  No, put down those guns of yours; for every shot you fire I swear that I will cut ten Basuto throats when we come to storm your koppies, as we shall do ere long.”

“Be silent,” I said, “and let me speak.”

Then I, too, called across the river, asking where was that fat captain of theirs, as I would talk with him.  One of the men shouted back that he had stopped behind, very sick, because of a ghost that he had seen.

“Ah!” I answered, “a ghost who pricked him in the throat.  Well, I was that ghost, and such are the things that happen to those who would harm Macumazahn and his friends.  Did you not say last night that he is a leopard who leaps out in the dark, bites and is gone again?”

“Yes,” the man shouted back, “and it is true, though had we known, O Macumazahn, that you were the ghost hiding in those stones, you should never have leapt again.  Oh! that white medicine-man who is dead has sent us on a mad errand.”

“So you will think when I come to visit you among your koppies.  Go home and take a message from Macumazahn to Sekukuni, who believes that the English have run away from him.  Tell him that they will return again and these Swazis with them, and that then he will cease to live and his town will be burnt and his tribe will no more be a tribe.  Away now, more swiftly than you came, since the water by which you thought to trap us is falling, and a Swazi impi gathers to make an end of every one of you.”

The man attempted no answer, nor did his people so much as fire on us.  They turned tail and crept off like a pack of frightened jackals—­pursued by the mocking of the Swazis.

Still in a way they had the laugh of us, seeing that they gave us a terrible fright and stole our wagon and thirty-two oxen.  Well, a year or two later I helped to pay them back for that fright and even recovered some of the oxen.