Chapter Nine.
What Lamont Heard.
In telling Ancram that the Matabele were likely to give trouble in the event of a further extensive destruction of their cattle, Lamont had been indulging in prophecy that was a good deal in nubibus. He had thought such trouble might very likely occur, but not just yet. Now, as he lay there in the darkness, a participator, unknown to them, in the most secret counsels of the plotting savages, he was simply aghast at the magnitude and imminence of the peril which the whole white population of the country either laughed at or ignored.
“Not yet the time for killing,” went on the voice of the one who had first proposed the listener’s own death. “Hau! But something else was said by Umlimo—ah-ah—something else! When Amakiwa are killed then it will rain. So said he. Our cattle are all dead, and our crops are dying. But—it has not yet rained. When Amakiwa are killed the rain will be great. Ah! ah! The rain will be great!”
As though burned in letters of fire within his mind there flashed back upon Lamont the recollection of these words. The sullen, uncordial reception, the reiteration of these words by those who witnessed their arrival—the meaning of all was clear now. This infernal Umlimo, whose quackeries and influence already had caused some stir in the land, had promised them copious rain on condition that the whites were slain.
“But so far there is none,” went on the speaker. “The storm of this night, which should have revived our thirsting cornlands, has passed over us dry. Yet it was such a storm as should have brought with it a flood. Whou! And these two Amakiwa are in our hands. But enough of them. Há! U’ Gandela. The talk is about it.”
“Eh! hé!” assented the listeners. “The talk is about it.”
“When the sun rises to-morrow,” went on the speaker, “it will rise on a great company of fools. All the Amakiwa, for a long journey around, will be hurrying into Gandela, where they are going to race horses, and play games, and drink strong waters. The day after, the sun will rise upon all this, but—it will set on no more Amakiwa—not at Gandela.”
“No more Amakiwa! ’M—’m!” hummed the audience.
“Yet the other plan might be better,” urged one of these. “To strike them all by twos and threes, all over our country. Thus would they be the quicker dead but with less trouble to us. How is that, Zwabeka?”
“Ours is the better way, Zazwe. You would first strike the tail of the snake, I and others the head. This is the best.”
“Zwabeka? Zazwe?” More than ever now did the listener prick up his ears. So it was Zwabeka himself—Zwabeka who was supposed to be sick—Zwabeka whose guest he was—Zwabeka the most influential chief in the Matyantatu district—who had been advocating the murder of himself and his travelling companion, and now was planning a treacherous and wholesale massacre of all the whites, when they should be gathered together wholly unsuspecting, and probably almost wholly unarmed, at the race meeting and gymkhana which was to be held at Gandela on the day after to-morrow! And Zazwe—an equally important chief located in the adjoining district of Sikumbutana! and from this he began to suspect what was in point of fact correct—that this meeting embraced some half-dozen or more of the most influential chiefs of Matabeleland. Here was a pretty sort of conspiracy he had all unconsciously been the means of getting behind.
Crouching low he listened with all his might and main. His brain seemed bursting. The very hammering of his pulses seemed to impair his sense of hearing. Oh, but it must not—it should not! Then a dog began barking on the farther side of the kraal. Oh, that infernal cur! The lives of hundreds of his unsuspecting countrymen—and women—depended on what he might hear next, and were they to be sacrificed to the yapping of an infernal mongrel cur! But still the brute yelped on.
And now as regarded his own safety this man thought nothing, he whom we have heard referred to as a ‘funkstick,’ as prone to show the white feather, and so forth. Whether the imputations were true or not, lying there now, listening for the continuation of the bloodthirsty and murderous plot, Lamont felt absolutely no shred of a sense of fear—instead, one of savage irritation. That yapping cur which interfered with his sense of hearing—could he but have strangled it with his bare hands! He was no longer Piers Lamont, an individual. He was an instrument, a delicate and subtle, though potent machine, and he felt as though the destined smoothness of his working had been interfered with and thrown out of order.
“Here then is the plan,” went on the one he had identified as Zwabeka, after a little general discussion which the barking of the dog and his own excitement had prevented him from adequately grasping. “When these Amakiwa are gathered at Gandela, on the next day but one, Qubani, who is known to some of them, will be in their midst. The place where they race their horses is outside the town, and it is overhung by a bush-covered mountain-side. Good! On that mountain-side, in the bushes, a strong impi will muster—and watch. When the sign is given—Ou! in no time will there be any Amakiwa left alive. Tell it again, my father.”
“This is it, Amakosi,” took up the voice, which the listener recognised as that of the famous witch-doctor who had spoken before, “Zwabeka has said I am known to some of the Amakiwa. To-morrow I shall be known to another of them, this Lamonti, whom I will talk to before he goes his way. Now see how more useful he is to us alive than dead—for the present. I will go in and talk with them pleasantly and look at their horse races. But it is afterwards, when they all collect to receive rewards for those who have won in races—then it is that our time will have come. They will all be collected together, having no thought but for who is to receive rewards. And they will all be looking one way, and shouting, and—all throwing up their hats. Whau! All throwing up their hats!”
A hum of expectant eagerness ran through the listeners. Could the—never so justified—eavesdropper have seen through that wall of grass and rough plaster he would have seen a tense, a bloodthirsty look on each set, thrust-forward face, hanging on what was to follow.
“Ha! All throwing up their hats. And I, Qubani, will be throwing up mine.”
“’M—’m!” hummed the listeners.
“Yet, how shall we see that, when so many hats are being thrown up?” asked Zwabeka’s voice.
“This way. I have a red cap, given me by one of them when last I was at Buluwayo. It will I throw up. The Amakiwa do not wear red caps.”
“But—if the time is not ripe?” struck in a voice which the listener thought not to have heard yet. “If, by chance, the Amakiwa are suspicious and are all armed—what then?”
“Au! That is not likely. But I will wear two caps—a white one under the red. If the time is ripe, the red one goes into the air—then those who are elsewhere will receive news by swift signal that all the Amakiwa in their part of the country be at once and immediately slain. If I see that the time is not yet, then I throw the white signal in the air. So must we sit still and deliberate further. It is the red signal or the white.”
“The red signal or the white!” echoed his hearers. “Ah! ah! The red signal or the white!”
“That is understood,” said Qubani. “The red signal or the white.”
“Eh! hé! Siyavuma!” hummed the others.
Now the listener thought to detect signs that the deliberations had come to an end, and if so, some, at any rate, of those within would be coming forth. Two courses suggested themselves to him. He lay between the hut and the outer stockade. The chances were that anyone coming out would take the other side, between the huts, to make their way to their respective quarters. But chances, unless one is driven to take them, are uncertain props, wherefore he decided to beat a retreat while there was yet time. Accordingly he crawled backwards a little, then stood upright, and, keeping against the dark background of the outer stockade, was lounging at unconcerned pace back in the direction of his hut, when—
“Sleep well, brother. Au! I think we need it.”
He had nearly cannoned against a tall figure which appeared round the side of a hut. The deep tones he recognised as those of Zwabeka. Clearly the chief mistook him in the darkness for one of those who had taken part in the indaba. He drawled an assent in a sleepy voice, and fervently blessed the unknown influence which had caused him to leave his large-brimmed hat in the hut when he had come forth on his midnight wandering, and now, with his blanket over his head, he might pass very well in the darkness for one of themselves, and, indeed, had so passed. But his trial was not over yet.
As the chief passed on there stepped forth two more figures, lazily chatting; this time behind him. The thing was too risky. In front of him yawned the black hole of the doorway of one of the huts, left open, perhaps, on account of the heat—only it was not hot. Through this he crept, without a moment’s hesitation, as though it were his own dwelling. Hardly was he within than the two who had been behind him likewise entered.
He stretched himself on the ground, emitting a forced yawn—very forced. The others, on their side of the tenement, followed his example. He could determine, by sounds of light snoring, that the tenement already contained others before these late arrivals. Soon the latter were likewise in the Land of Nod.
Lying there in the pitchy darkness Lamont realised that his position was exciting, to put it mildly. Here he was, in the same hut with two of the conspirators, and how many others he could, of course, not determine. The next thing was to get out again. But for that he must take his time. Hurry would be fatal.
If ever minutes had seemed to him hours, assuredly they did so now. And with this idea a new source of peril struck him. In the dead silence he thought to hear the ticking of his watch. What if other ears should hear it too. He thought to stop it—but how so much as get it open in the darkness without breaking the glass; and then just one fragment on the floor of the hut would betray him in the morning. Still, with his blanket tightly round him, the ticking might not be heard. At last he reckoned it time to make a move.
It is a mistake to imagine that savages are necessarily light sleepers. When no particular reason for watchfulness exists, your South African native is anything but that. Rolled up in his blanket, head and all, he will sleep as soundly as the dead, and will require little short of violence to awaken him; wherefore the other inhabitants of the hut, being utterly unsuspicious of the presence of a stranger in their midst, had attained to exactly that stage of somnolence; consequently, when the said stranger crept through the door, no one was aware of it. Again his nerves thrilled as he found himself once more in the chilly night air. He had still a little way to go. What if the dogs should wind him as he crossed the open space, and raise a clamour? But they did not, and with a sigh of infinite relief he found himself safe within his own hut. He could hear his travelling companion mildly snoring. What an extraordinary piece of luck that they should have met when they did, for, by the light of what he had heard, he had no doubt but that his treacherous entertainers would have murdered him. Had he spent the night alone in that kraal, such would have been his fate, but the superstitious dread in which, for some reason or other, they seemed to hold the priest, had saved him, and in the result would save a good many more.
Then the grisly agency of his awakening occurred to him, and indeed no more effective means could have been employed not merely to do so but to keep him awake. His fellow traveller would, he supposed, have called it the hand of Providence, and he thought it looked very much as if such were the case, for Lamont was no scoffer.
“I suppose I ought to make a vow never again to kill a tarantula,” he said to himself; “for what would have been the result had I slept as hard and long as our good friend over there, well, Heaven only knows.”
Sitting there in the darkness, waiting for dawn, he was thinking, and thinking hard. There had been warning rumours here and there that the natives were not so content under the white man’s rule as was supposed—nor that they deemed themselves anything like so roundly squashed and beaten less than three years earlier as they should have. Such rumours, however, were not acceptable to the “powers that were,” and their originators discouraged; and bearing this in mind, what was seemingly the most obvious course—to lose no time in warning the proper authorities, to wit—was the very last thing that Lamont had determined to follow. If he started warning people, nobody would believe him. They would simply laugh and say he had got the funks, meanwhile it would be sure to leak out to the natives that such warning had been given. They would put two and two together, and, connecting it in some way with his presence at their kraal that night, would entirely change their plan, probably with disastrous result to the white population. On the other hand, if the massacre at Gandela were averted, it would show, as they had agreed, that the time for rising was not yet ripe—which would afford him time to turn his warning to proper account, a thing he could not possibly do in one day.
That the massacre at Gandela should be averted he was fully determined, and that he himself should be the means of averting it—he alone, working to his own hand.