“And always shall be, Hau!” echoed his listeners. “And always shall be. My father, I think not.”
“I am old, my sons, and I shall end my life peacefully,” answered the assegai-maker—“shall end my life as the white man’s dog. There are those among you who will end your lives in blood.”
“Ha! And what then?” cried the man who had worked at the Rand. “We fight for our father and chief, and for—” and here he suddenly stopped. He would name no names, but all knew what was in his mind, and the same thought was in theirs. “I would I had lived in the time when we were a nation indeed, when our assegais bit deep and drank blood. My father lost his life in blood at Nodwengu, but he had washed his spear in the blood of the whites twice before that. And I, his son, I have to turn out and work at mending the white man’s roads. Hau!”
“You will get all your chances of a death in blood—a glorious death in blood—presently, my sons,” said the old assegai-maker, his face puckered up quizzically. “The whites will take care of that.”
“Au! I like not this talk,” growled one of the group, a much older man. “It is as if our father were putting bad múti upon the weapons he is making.”
“No múti, good or bad, put I on them, Sekun-ya,” returned the old man tranquilly. “The múti is for those who use them.”
There was a laugh at this, and then the group fell to talking, and their topic was the former one—the capture of the white women in the coming rising. It was not a pleasant conversation. The man who had worked at the Rand was giving voluble impressions and even experiences of the great gold town, and his hearers listened delightedly. Such experiences, however, were not calculated to deepen their respect for the white man, or for his womenkind. The while the old assegai-maker worked on. At last he deposited the last blade to cool.
“There, my sons. You will have as many as you can carry—when darkness falls,” he said. “Sapazani has an open hand, yet I would like to have what comes out of it before these are used, for thereafter nothing may there be to have. Say that unto the chief.”
This they promised to do, amid much merriment. But the old sceptic did not controvert them; he merely reiterated—
“Say it.”