A gasp of relief, admiration, awe, went up from the spectators of this powerfully tragic scene. Then they turned to leave the mount of death.
“Whau! these are abatagati indeed!” quoth Sobuza. “But they are right valiant fighters.”
“And this, my father, what shall we do with it?” said one of the warriors, designating the body of Ingonyama, which lay just as it had fallen, covered with the great lion’s skin. “Shall we not place it on ‘the point of the Tooth,’ that even the very birds may behold the fate of the enemies of the Great Great One?”
“The king’s orders did not say that,” replied Sobuza, who was not free from motives of class-feeling. “Ingonyama was a chief, and a brave man, and now he is dead. Let him lie in peace, for was he not a chief?”
“What of this?” said Dawes, touching the lion’s skin.
“We want it not,” answered Sobuza. “It, too, looks like tagati. See! The life was let out of it and its wearer by the same hole.”
“That’s a fact,” said Dawes. “But, if you’re so particular, we are not. We are going to have this—eh, Ridgeley?” And he plucked the lion’s skin from the body of the dead chief.
The Zulus stared, then shrugged their shoulders. A white man might do all kinds of things which were not lawful for themselves, wherefore they did not think so very much of the act.
As they descended from the dreadful hill of slaughter, Dawes narrated all that had befallen him since Gerard had left—his jeopardy in the kraal, and how he had held Ingonyama at the point of his revolver, and that within a few yards of his dancing warriors; then his bold attempt at trekking away, the shooting of the councillor, Sonkwana, the fight, and his own recapture. Nothing on earth had saved him from the frightful fate to which he had been adjudged, but the fact of the lateness of the hour—that and the arrival of the king’s impi at dawn. It was too dark to put him to death that evening, and so he had spent the night a close prisoner, with so many hours of silence and darkness before him wherein to look forward to the terrible torture which awaited him the next day.
Before dawn, however, had come tidings that the king’s impi was marching upon the place, and he was dragged forth into the midst of the whole horde of exasperated barbarians, clamouring like wolves for his blood. But it had been decided to send emissaries to the king’s induna, and meanwhile he was taken to the summit of The Tooth.