“Yes. Well, Rawson was with him before, and they know each other. But here’s where the fun comes in. Once he gets suspicious—and, of course, he will, on the terms I told you before, he’ll stick to us like our shadows night and day, or at any rate take care that someone else does—say, when he’s too drunk to attend to business himself. Then how are we going to set about our prospecting with the care and nicety and, above all, freedom from interruption it requires?”
“When he’s too drunk, I think you said, Joe? I read a saving clause in that. What sort of a type—both outwardly and inwardly—is this very attractive being?”
“Oh, outwardly he’s a thick-set, shaggy, broken-nosed brute whom any jury would hang at sight without retiring from the box. For the other part, he hasn’t a redeeming quality, unless it is that he’s as plucky as they make ’em. The only point on which no one has ever been able to damn Bully Rawson is that of his pluck. On all others, everybody who has ever known him is united in damning him to a lurid degree.”
“H’m! Yes, it’s a nuisance,” mused Wyvern. “One rather reckoned on difficulties at the hands of the noble savage, and now it seems we are likely to find them the thickest at those of a white man and a brother. Well, we are two to one. One or other of us must manage to be one too many for Mr Bully Rawson.”
Here Mtezani interrupted. He had been away on a private prowl of his own, and had come back in a hurry.
“Nkose, there are people coming,” he said. “Impela, they are not very far behind me, and one of them is a white man.”
“A white man! What is he like?” said Fleetwood. “Did you see him?”
“Eh-hi!” And the young Zulu gave a rapid and graphic description.
“That is Inxele,” pronounced Hlabulana, who was squatted near.
Fleetwood turned upon his companion a whimsical look.