The chief shrugged his shoulders, emitting a thick puff of smoke from his bearded lips.
“They are strangers,” he answered. “They are Ama-Gcaléka, and are returning to their own country across the Kei. They have been visiting some of their friends at Nteya’s kraal.”
“But why are they all so heavily armed? We are not at war.”
“Whau, Ixeshane! You know there is trouble just now with the Amafengu (Fingoes). These men might be molested on their way back to their own country. They are afraid, so they go armed.”
“Who are they afraid of? Not the Amafengu, their dogs? Why should they go armed and travel in such strength?”
The chief fixed his glance upon his interlocutor’s face, and there was a merry twinkle in his eye as he turned away again.
“A man is not afraid of one dog, Ixeshane, nor yet of two,” he replied. “But if a hundred set upon him, he must kill them or be killed himself.”
Eustace uttered a murmur of assent. Then after a pause he said:
“To travel in a strong party like that in these times is not wise. What if these Gcalékas were to fall in with a Police patrol—would there not surely be a fight? That might bring on a war. I am a peaceable man. Everybody is not. What if they had met a less peaceable man than myself, and threatened him as they did me? There would have been a fight and the white man might have been killed—for what can one man do against twenty?”
“He need not have been killed—only frightened,” struck in the other Kafir, Sikuni.