“Something ’twixt the sailor lad and the tiger. As I searched aroun’ fer a match I yeard the gun, there were a roar and a shriek, an’ when I got the light started an’ went out there were only his old hat an’ the gun. I’m not fooling with any o’ yer tigers that’s got sperrits watchin’ over ’em. I’m going home in the mornin’.”
Chapter Six.
The Baboon and the Tortoise.
I have referred to Bolo, an old Kaffir medicine man, who, on his professional tour round the country, always remained a day or two with Abe Pike, in his way, a great doctor with a valuable fund of information about the medicinal properties of plants and roots. Bolo turned up in the evening, fresh from a beer dance, and the manner of his coming was that of a ravenous lion. He charged down upon the house in the dusk, with his necklet bones rattling, the horsehair mane flying, and the bellow of his deep voice setting the dogs off into a fury of barking, up he came—leaping, bounding, hurling himself forward with in-creditable swiftness, whirling his knobbed kerrie, his eyes glaring and his features twitching, the dogs snapping around him—right up to the door, as if he meant to burst in and brain everyone he met. Then he stopped, smiled in a wide vacuous way, took snuff, and squatted down, while the dogs as suddenly ceased their clamour and walked sheepishly away.
“Well, you clatterin’ ole heathen,” said Abe, seating himself on the door-step, and shaving slices of tobacco against the ball of his thumb; “what mischief have you been up to?”
“Yoh,” said Bolo, resting his long arms on his knees; “I have heard tales of the black tiger and the white man’s fear. But my medicine has sent the black evil away back again to the big kloof.”
“To the kloof on my farm?”
“Eweh! Why not? The white man is a great medicine man. Has he not a familiar in the old baboon—who is the most cunning of familiars?”