The latter did not immediately answer, and Greenoak sat and watched him. Such words, uttered by any other man, would have been equivalent to the signing of his death-warrant. But Greenoak knew his ground. He had saved the life of the young chief once, and he knew that the latter would never forget it as long as he lived. Moreover, between the two there was a very genuine liking, and a longing to save this fine young fool from the ruinous consequences of the mad, impracticable scheme on which he was already embarking had borne a full part in moving him to start upon his perilous undertaking.
“Whau! Kulondeka. Are you sent by Iruvumente?” (The Government.)
“Not so, Matanzima. Yet the answers I am getting might well make it appear as though I were. For they are just the answers that might be got ready for a Government commissioner.”
The other laughed again, but just a trifle shamefacedly. He knew, only too well, the utter futility of trying to hoodwink this one man of all others. The latter went on—
“Where are all the cattle belonging to the people? The land here is green and the grass soft and fresh. Who would have thought the pasture in the Gombazana Forest could be better?”
Here again was food for fresh discomfiture. For how should Kulondeka have known so accurately that the tribe had been steadily sending away all its women and children to the wooded fastnesses he had mentioned, in order to have its hands free entirely? Yet what did not Eulondeka know?
“For that,” answered Matanzima, “there may be some reason. The Ama Gcaleka might come over and seize some of our cattle to make up for all your people took from them, what time we did not aid them. Ah—ah! What time we did not aid them,” he added significantly.
“If you feared that, why did you not send word to Bokelo?” said Greenoak, using the name by which the Commandant was known among the tribes. “He would have sent sufficient Amapolise to patrol the border, so that such a thing could not have befallen.”
The look on Matanzima’s face at the mention of such a contingency would have escaped pretty nearly any other man than Harley Greenoak. Him it did not escape. Yes. He was getting his finger more and more tightly on “the pulse.”
“When there is lightning in the air, does a man go about flourishing steel,” was the reply, with another amused laugh. “Whau! some of our people are hotheaded, and not always clear-sighted—as you yourself have just seen,” he added whimsically. “There has been lightning in the air, and Bokelo’s Amapolise might be just the steel which should draw down the crash.”