Hearing the shot Hans came running from the waggon to see what was the matter.  Hans, I should say, was that same Hottentot who had been the companion of most of my journeyings since my father’s day.  He was with me when as a young fellow I accompanied Retief to Dingaan’s kraal, and like myself, escaped the massacre.[*] Also we shared many other adventures, including the great one in the Land of the Ivory Child where he slew the huge elephant-god, Jana, and himself was slain.  But of this journey we did not dream in those days.

[*] See the book called “Marie.”—­Editor.

For the rest Hans was a most entirely unprincipled person, but as the Boers say, “as clever as a waggonload of monkeys.”  Also he drank when he got the chance.  One good quality he had, however; no man was ever more faithful, and perhaps it would be true to say that neither man nor woman ever loved me, unworthy, quite so well.

In appearance he rather resembled an antique and dilapidated baboon; his face was wrinkled like a dried nut and his quick little eyes were bloodshot.  I never knew what his age was, any more than he did himself, but the years had left him tough as whipcord and absolutely untiring.  Lastly he was perhaps the best hand at following a spoor that ever I knew and up to a hundred and fifty yards or so, a very deadly shot with a rifle especially when he used a little single-barrelled, muzzle-loading gun of mine made by Purdey which he named Intombi or Maiden.  Of that gun, however, I have written in “The Holy Flower” and elsewhere.

“What is it, Baas?” he asked.  “Here there are no lions, nor any game.”

“Look the other side of the bush, Hans.”

He slipped round it, making a wide circle with his usual caution, then, seeing the snake which was, by the way, I think, the biggest immamba I ever killed, suddenly froze, as it were, in a stiff attitude that reminded me of a pointer when it scents game.  Having made sure that it was dead, he nodded and said,

“Black ’mamba, or so you would call it, though I know it for something else.”

“What else, Hans?”

“One of the old witch-doctor Zikali’s spirits which he sets at the mouth of this kloof to warn him of who comes or goes.  I know it well, and so do others.  I saw it listening behind a stone when you were up the kloof last evening talking with the Opener-of-Roads.”

“Then Zikali will lack a spirit,” I answered, laughing, “which perhaps he will not miss amongst so many.  It serves him right for setting the brute on me.”

“Quite so, Baas.  He will be angry.  I wonder why he did it?” he added suspiciously, “seeing that he is such a friend of yours.”

“He didn’t do it, Hans.  These snakes are very fierce and give battle, that is all.”

Hans paid no attention to my remark, which probably he thought only worthy of a white man who does not understand, but rolled his yellow, bloodshot eyes about, as though in search of explanations.  Presently they fell upon the ivory that hung about my neck, and he started.