“What is it?” he asked.

“Mauled by leopard.  Wounds won’t heal, and fever.  I don’t think he can last long.”

“What do you know about it?  Let me see him.”

Well, he saw him and did wonderful things.  That tin box of his was full of medicines and surgical instruments, which latter he boiled before he used them.  Also he washed his hands till I thought the skin would come off them, using up more soap than I could spare.  First he gave poor Charlie a dose of something that seemed to kill him; he said he had that drug from the Kaffirs.  Then he opened up those wounds upon his thigh and cleaned them out and bandaged them with boiled herbs.  Afterwards, when Scroope came to again, he gave him a drink that threw him into a sweat and took away the fever.  The end of it was that in two days’ time his patient sat up and asked for a square meal, and in a week we were able to begin to carry him to the coast.

“Guess that message of yours saved Brother Scroope’s life,” said old John, as he watched him start.

I made no answer.  Here I may state, however, that through my own men I inquired a little as to Brother John’s movements at the time of what he called the message.  It seemed that he had arranged to march towards the coast on the next morning, but that about two hours after sunset suddenly he ordered them to pack up everything and follow him.  This they did and to their intense disgust those Kaffirs were forced to trudge all night at the heels of Dogeetah, as they called him.  Indeed, so weary did they become, that had they not been afraid of being left alone in an unknown country in the darkness, they said they would have thrown down their loads and refused to go any further.

That is as far as I was able to take the matter, which may be explained by telepathy, inspiration, instinct, or coincidence.  It is one as to which the reader must form his own opinion.

During our week together in camp and our subsequent journey to Delagoa Bay and thence by ship to Durban, Brother John and I grew very intimate, with limitations.  Of his past, as I have said, he never talked, or of the real object of his wanderings which I learned afterwards, but of his natural history and ethnological (I believe that is the word) studies he spoke a good deal.  As, in my humble way, I also am an observer of such matters and know something about African natives and their habits from practical experience, these subjects interested me.

Amongst other things, he showed me many of the specimens that he had collected during his recent journey; insects and beautiful butterflies neatly pinned into boxes, also a quantity of dried flowers pressed between sheets of blotting paper, amongst them some which he told me were orchids.  Observing that these attracted me, he asked me if I would like to see the most wonderful orchid in the whole world.  Of course I said yes, whereon he produced out of one of his cases a flat package about two feet six square.  He undid the grass mats in which it was wrapped, striped, delicately woven mats such as they make in the neighbourhood of Zanzibar.  Within these was the lid of a packing-case.  Then came more mats and some copies of The Cape Journal spread out flat.  Then sheets of blotting paper, and last of all between two pieces of cardboard, a flower and one leaf of the plant on which it grew.