Now all these tales of war and of great battles fired my blood, for I would fain have been in them; yet here I was, hiding away as a fugitive. But when I would have boldly returned, craving only that Dingane would allow me to wield a spear in the ranks of his troops, Lalusini dissuaded me. The hostility of Tambusa and Umhlela burned as hot against me as ever, and indeed I had fled not any too soon. She bade me wait. She herself was high in favour with the King by reason of the victories which had attended the Zulu arms, for she had foretold them.
Not without risk did I thus meet Lalusini. I could not reveal the real relationship between us, and the suspicions of the fierce Bapongqolo once fairly aroused, I might be slain suddenly and without warning, and no opportunity given me of explanation or self-defence. Indeed, after the first time, I thought I noticed a frost of suspiciousness in the converse of those people towards me as we sat around our fires at night. But the second time something so unlooked for happened that it gave them all something else to think about.
Lalusini had finished telling me all there was of news when, of a sudden, her manner became strange and suspicious.
“We are being watched, Untúswa,” she said quietly.
“Watched? Why then, it will be bad—ah, very bad—for the watcher.”
And hardly had the words escaped me than I darted from her side. I hurled myself through the thickness of the bush, but something was already crashing through it away from me. I made out the form of a man.
“Now, stop!” I cried—a casting assegai poised for a throw. “Stop! or I cleave thee to the heart.”
I was about to hurl the spear fair between the shoulders of the fleeing man—who was now not many paces in front—when he stopped suddenly. I went at him. He turned round and faced me, a glare of hate and fury in his eyes that seemed to scorch—to burn. And I—Whau! I stood as one suddenly turned to stone, the uplifted assegai powerless in my stiffened grasp. For the face was that of a ghost—the dreadful glare of hate and fury that paralysed me was upon the face of a ghost. I was gazing upon one whom I had seen slain, whom my own eyes had beheld clubbed to death by the King’s slayers—Tola, the chief of the witch doctors.
We stood for a moment thus, motionless, I gazing upon the horrible form of one I knew to be dead, as it stood there, shadowed in the gloom of the trees. Then, slowly raising an arm, the voice came, deep and hollow—
“Retire—or I put that upon thee which shall blast and wither thy heart and turn to water thy courage; which shall change the most valiant of fighting-men into the most cowardly of women.”