“Steal as much as a young calf, Coutlass, and we’ll let Brown choose the tree!  Try it on if you don’t believe me!”

The villagers closed their gate against us by dragging great piles of thorn across the gap in the rough palisade, but, as Coutlass pointed out, they would have to open it up again to let the cattle in before dark, so we sat down and ate the remaining fragments of the hippo tongue—­no ambrosia by that time; it had to be eaten, to save it from utter waste!

Then Coutlass once more did a first-class devil dance backward and forward this time before the gate, putting genius into it and fear into the hearts of the defenders.  Kazimoto helped even more than he by discovering a native within the palisade who could speak a common tongue.

Their villagers held a very noisy council on their side of the thorn obstruction, under the apparent impression that it was sound- and bullet-proof.  It was beginning to be pretty obvious that a man who advised volleying through the crevices with spears was winning the argument when Kazimoto detected familiar accents and raised his voice.  After that the barricade was dragged aside within ten minutes and we entered, if not in honor, at least in temporary safety.

Luxury is a question of contrast.  That evening in a hut assigned to us by the chief, squatting on the trodden cow-dung floor, leaning against the dried-mud sides, with a little fire of sticks in the midst to give us light and keep mosquitoes at a distance at the expense of almost unbearable heat, we ate porridge made from mtama as they call their kaffir corn, and washed it down with milk—­good rich cows’ milk, milked by Kazimoto into our own metal pot instead of their unwashed gourds.  Lucullus never dined better.

The feast was only rather spoiled by two things:  we all had chiggers in our feet—­the minute fleas that haunt the dust of native villages and insert themselves under toe-nails to grow great and lay their eggs.  (Nearly every native in the village had more than one toe missing.) And the chief felt obliged to insert his smelly presence among us and ask innumerable idiotic questions through the medium of his interpreter and Kazimoto.  He received some astonishing answers, but would not have been satisfied with anything more reasonable.  We wanted him satisfied, and gave our interpreter free rein.

The main trouble was we had nothing of value to offer him.  Money was something he had no knowledge of.  He wanted beads of a certain size and color; for two handfuls of them he expressed himself willing to be our friend for life.  We had to educate him about money, and Kazimoto assured him that the silver rupees Fred produced from a bag were so precious that governments went to war to get them away from other governments.

But the impression still prevailed that we were wasikini—­poor men; and that is a fatal qualification in the savage mind.

“Why have you only one gun?”