Then he waved his hand again, and Stephen stepped aside muttering something, for he and Mavovo had been very intimate and his voice choked in his throat with grief.  Now the old Zulu’s glazing eye fell upon Hans, who was sneaking about, I think with a view of finding an opportunity of bidding him a last good-bye.

“Ah!  Spotted Snake,” he cried, “so you have come out of your hole now that the fire has passed it, to eat the burnt frogs in the cinders.  It is a pity that you who are so clever should be a coward, since our lord Macumazana needed one to load for him on the hill and would have killed more of the hyenas had you been there.”

“Yes, Spotted Snake, it is so,” echoed an indignant chorus of the other Zulus, while Stephen and I and even the mild Brother John looked at him reproachfully.

Now Hans, who generally was as patient under affront as a Jew, for once lost his temper.  He dashed his hat upon the ground, and danced on it; he spat towards the surviving Zulu hunters; he even vituperated the dying Mavovo.

“O son of a fool!” he said, “you pretend that you can see what is hid from other men, but I tell you that there is a lying spirit in your lips.  You called me a coward because I am not big and strong as you were, and cannot hold an ox by the horns, but at least there is more brain in my stomach than in all your head.  Where would all of you be now had it not been for poor Spotted Snake the ‘coward,’ who twice this day has saved every one of you, except those whom the Baas’s father, the reverend Predikant, has marked upon the forehead to come and join him in a place that is even hotter and brighter than that burning town?”

Now we looked at Hans, wondering what he meant about saving us twice, and Mavovo said: 

“Speak on quickly, O Spotted Snake, for I would hear the end of your story.  How did you help us in your hole?”

Hans began to grub about in his pockets, from which finally he produced a match-box wherein there remained but one match.

“With this,” he said.  “Oh! could none of you see that the men of Hassan had all walked into a trap?  Did none of you know that fire burns thatched houses, and that a strong wind drives it fast and far?  While you sat there upon the hill with your heads together, like sheep waiting to be killed, I crept away among the bushes and went about my business.  I said nothing to any of you, not even to the Baas, lest he should answer me, ’No, Hans, there may be an old woman sick in one of those huts and therefore you must not fire them.’  In such matters who does not know that white people are fools, even the best of them, and in fact there were several old women, for I saw them running for the gateway.  Well, I crept up by the green fence which I knew would not burn and I came to the north gate.  There was an Arab sentry left there to watch.