After this they sat together learning a polyglot speech that would serve roughly as a medium of exchange.
And this was the story of the chief, slowly put together out of these talks—
"I am Muata the chief. The kraal of my house is toward the setting sun, but the fire no longer burns on the hearth. The men-robbers fell upon the place in the early morning. The people were scattered like goats before the lion. Many were taken by the men-robbers, and many were slain; and among them my father.
"The chief's wife, my mother, fled with me into the Great Forest. Many days she lived on roots, and the 'little people' found her in her wanderings. They took her by crooked paths far from the land of her people. Ohe!
"Through the dark woods—through the dark and terrible woods, through the mist and the rain, with much pain, she followed them as they went before her like shadows. And in the folds of her blanket she bore me on her back. It is true.
"She was straight as the palm when she fled from the kraal, and when after long journeying she set me down at the hiding-place, she was thin and bent. Thin and bent was the chief's wife, she who had maidens to wait on her.
"At the hiding-place in the forest there were people whose kraals had been burnt by the men-robbers. Outcasts they were, of many tribes, living together without a chief; but the place was fat, and they grew fat, being without spirit.
"And Muata the child played with other children and grew. He grew on the fatness of the land, and when he could walk, his playmates were the young of the jackal; his playthings were the bow and the spear.
"Ohe! Muata grew to strength like the lion's cub in the knowledge of the hunt. She, even his mother, taught him to follow the trail, showed him the leaf bruised by the foot of a man traveling, showed him the tracks of the beasts, taught him the cries of the animals.
"She rubbed the oil into his skin, set him to hurl the spear, to shaft the arrow, to hit the mark; set him to run and swim, to creep like a snake, to bound like the buck.