She had not been wandering, not even playing outside with the other children. When last seen she was creeping through the door of the hut wherein she usually dwelt—that of Fumana, the youngest of my wives—and this hut she had never been seen to leave. When last seen it was shortly before the setting of the sun.
This was a matter to be turned inside-out, and that speedily, to which end I called up all those concerned, and questioned them one by one; the children who had last been with her, my wives, and the Bakoni slave-girls. But while my two younger wives were half-mad with grief—for they loved the little one—Nangeza only laughed evilly, saying that it could be but a small thing to a mighty chief like myself the loss of a wretched little whelp of the Amabuna: for thus she would often speak to anger me, knowing that I always held Kwelanga to be not of the Amabuna at all, but of a far greater race.
“So, woman!” I replied, pointing my stick at her menacingly, “it may be a small matter to myself, but it will be a weighty one for all here concerned, for did not the King give Kwelanga into our care? Ha! the alligators have been robbed of their food to-night—it may be that to-morrow they will be full.”
I could see fear upon the faces of those who heard my words; but again Nangeza laughed evilly. I was resolved now that the end of such doings had come. The morrow would show.
“Now to the search!” I cried. “The little one may have wandered abroad and have sunk down to sleep in the forest. She may not be far.”
“Perhaps yonder moves her bed,” said Nangeza, with her black laugh, as the wild howling of a hyena sounded very near. “While such are moving about it is little enough will be found of any child who has sunk down to sleep in the forest, and it has long been night.”
A murmur of approval greeted these words, for few among us liked to move about at night. And the voices of the hyenas and other beasts wailing dismally through the forest sounded as the ravenings of ghost animals scenting the blood of those who still lived as men. But for such considerations I cared little then. I gave my orders, and no man there but preferred to face the ghost animals to facing me having disobeyed them. So we set out, by twos and threes, on our search.
There was a half-moon low down in the heavens, and by its light we searched—ah, yes, how we searched! We hunted hither and thither like wild dogs questing a scent, beneath the dark shades of the forest trees, where the beasts would howl dismally across our path, and the rustle of huge serpents fleeing away in the brake would make our hearts leap—not knowing what evil beings of the night were abroad. We searched over the openness of the plain, and among the rugged rocks where we had found the white isanusi. We searched indeed far out beyond any distance such a little child could travel. But we searched in vain.
Not only through the night did we search, but well on into the next day. Sometimes our hearts would chill as we saw something white, like a skull or bones, lying away from us, but on drawing near it would prove to be a stone, or perchance the skull of a kid or a buck, devoured by wild animals. I sent runners to all the outlying kraals around us but these returned bearing no news, and at last so thoroughly had we searched that I was constrained to believe that it was as Nangeza had so evilly suggested—the little one had wandered away from the kraal, and, having lost herself, had been carried off or devoured by wild animals.
Now my own heart was sad and sore, for, Nkose, I loved this little creature, with the eyes of heaven and hair like the sun, whom I had saved from the spears of our young men, and who had come to look upon me as her father; and, indeed, she would sometimes place her tiny white hand upon my great dark one and laugh, and ask whether hers would grow black, too, when she became old. And now I should see her no more; hear her rippling, joyous laughter never again—ah, Nkose, my heart was very sore. But my younger wives, Nxope and Fumana, they made terrible moan, far more so than they would have made over child of their own blood.