“What of Inyovu? Will he come back, do you think?”
“Ou nkose!” said the fellow with a half grin. “Who may say? He is Matabele. We are not.”
“Well, get to work again.”
“Nkose.”
Peters sat a little longer thinking—and the subject of his thoughts was the man whose life he had saved—to wit Ancram.
“I don’t like the cuss,” he said to himself. “Wish I’d left him where he was—no—I don’t exactly that—still, I wish he’d move on. He’s an ungrateful dog, anyhow.”
The noonday air was sensuous and drowsy. Even the screech of the crickets was so unintermittent as to form part of the prevailing stillness. Peters began to nod.
“Nkose!”
The salutation was sulky rather than hearty. Peters started wide awake again, to behold his missing boy, Inyovu.
The latter was a young Matabele, tall and slight, and clad in nothing but an old shirt and a skin mútya. But his face was the face of a truculent savage—the face of one who would have been far more in his element as a unit in some marauding expedition sent forth by Lobengula in the good old times, than serving in the peaceful avocation of mine boy to a white prospector.