“The bowl, my father,” cried Nxala eagerly. “Break it into pieces—in small pieces—for it is bad múti to drop it at the moment of drinking.”
“It is worse múti, sometimes, to drink the moment before dropping it,” answered the old man, tranquilly, setting the bowl beside him. “I will have another brought.” And again he raised his voice in a hail. Again the women appeared, and having supplied another bowl, and also a fresh brew of tywala, withdrew.
Nxala, watching, could scarcely restrain himself. The first part of his diabolical scheme had miscarried. Was it time for the second act? And there before him sat the old chief, the fine assegai in his hand—yet held in a firm grip, he did not fail to notice—crooning words of sibongo to it, as he recalled its deeds in past times. Had the scheme succeeded all would have gone so easy. This kraal of Zavula’s was an insignificant cluster of a dozen huts, whither the old chief loved to retire. He was old—what more natural than that he should die in retirement? Yes—it was time for the second act. He would give the signal.
“Have you heard, my father; the new song that the people have made?” he said. “The new war-song? Listen. This is how it runs.”
But before he had uttered three words of it a trampling of hoofs was heard outside the hut, and a lusty European voice—though speaking faultless Zulu—enquiring which was the hut of the chief. Following on the answer there came through the low door of the hut a man, a white man—and he was known to both as the magistrate’s clerk from Kwabulazi.
“Greeting to you, father,” he cried, falling into the native idiom, and shaking Zavula heartily by the hand.
“Greeting, my son,” answered the old chief genially. “Sit. Here is tywala. Have you ridden far?”
“Far? Have I not? And I am come to sleep at your kraal, for Kwabulazi is another stage away, and it is night, and my horse is dead lame.”
Nxala, taking in the situation, was beside himself with inward rage, which, in fact, had got nearly to that pitch where the Machiavellian caution of the savage is apt to forget, and lose itself in an outburst of uncontrolled, unthinking blood lust. But he had not overlooked the fact that the new arrival had, slung around him, a remarkably business-like revolver. No, the time was not yet.
A dozen armed savages, lying in wait in the dark bush shadows a little way beyond Zavula’s kraal, had sprung up at the first words of the new war-song, which was to be the signal, but subsided again at the sound of the approaching horse-hoofs. Now, after a muttered consultation, they withdrew to a distance to await their leader’s reappearance and instructions. But there was an armed white man, and he an official, sleeping at Zavula’s kraal, which made all the difference.