The old man had dismounted now, and was haranguing the assembled Kafirs, such of them as were left, for quite half of the original rioters had melted away. Here was a thing to have happened, he told them. Children of the Great Chief to fall to rending each other like quarrelsome dogs, and that under the eyes of white men; just now, too, when it behoved them to stand well in the eyes of the white man.
This deliverance, however, was not exactly popular. Even the rank and venerable age of the speaker could not repress a ripple of resentful muttering. White men? Mere dogs, dogs whom they would soon send howling back to their own kraals—was the gist of it. But the old chief continued his rebuke. Let them go home, he concluded, if they could not behave otherwise than as half-grown boys.
“I see before me, my friend, Kulondeka,” he added. “Now I am going to talk with a man.”
“Eulondeka”—meaning “safe”—was the name by which Harley Greenoak was known to all the Bantu tribes south of the Zambesi. The latter greeted the old chief with great cordiality, and in a moment they were deep in conversation.
“I say, I rather like the look of that old chap,” said Dick Selmes, who had skipped up on to the stoep again—he had clean forgotten his late protégé now. “Hanged if I won’t stand him a drink. Give him a good big one, MacFennel.”
“He wouldn’t touch it, Mr Selmes; no, not if you gave him twenty cows,” answered the innkeeper, with a laugh. “He’s got such an awful example before him in the shape of his big chief, old Sandili. That old soaker would think nothing of mopping up a whole bucketful of grog, and as much more as you liked to stack under his nose.”
“By Jove!” exclaimed Dick. “We’ll give him a yard of ’bacco instead—no—give him a whole roll, I’ll stand the racket.”
“Ah, that’ll fetch him,” said the other, going inside to find the required article.
“I say, Greenoak. Introduce me,” sang out Dick. “First time I’ve seen a chief, and I must have a jaw with him—through you, of course.”
The old man, who wore about him no insignia of chieftainship, unless it were a very old and well-worn suit of European clothes, smiled kindly at the young one; and remarked that he must be the son of a very great man in his own country, for he looked it. Then, as Dick handed him the big roll of Boer tobacco which MacFennel just then brought, he fairly beamed.