“Couldn’t he show us his hut?” he said. “I should like to see what the hut of a big chief is like inside.”
This was readily acceded to. Sapazani rose and led the way. Then Denham was even more struck by the tall, magnificently-proportioned form, the great muscles showing through the brown satiny skin as the man walked, easily, leisurely, straight as a pine-tree, with head slightly thrown back. Verna could not help noticing that the two men, standing upright together, were of exactly the same height and build, the savage chieftain and the up-to-date English gentleman.
Denham admired the interior of the cool, spacious hut, with its polished floor of hard, black clay, and the bowl-like fire-place in the centre, the assegais disposed on pegs around the walls, and the clean, rolled-up mats against one side. The place was a model of coolness and cleanliness, he decided.
When they got outside again several of the chief’s wives, convened by Verna, were standing waiting for them. To these she distributed various things she had brought, chatting and joking familiarly with them. They were fine, merry-faced girls, and here again Denham found a keen bit of character study. Sapazani accompanied his visitors to the gate of the kraal—he was a stickler for old-time Zulu etiquette, as Ben Halse and Verna, of course, knew, wherefore they had hitched up their horses outside and bade them farewell.
“Well, and what do you think of our ‘show’ chief now, Alaric?” said Verna, as they started on their homeward ride.
“He’s a splendid-looking fellow, and his manners are perfect,” he answered. But to himself he was thinking that had Sapazani been a white man he would have resented the way in which the chief had looked at Verna more than once. Being a native, of course, any such idea was absurd, preposterous, out of the question. But he wondered whether Ben Halse had noticed it.
And Sapazani, looking after them, was saying to himself—
“The trap is set, and yonder is the bait—au! yonder is the bait—impela.”