“You hear him, chief,” exclaimed the wizard. “He seeks to put you off with empty words. Now hear me; I will take away this woe. The cattle of the Bechuanas shall not die. But I cannot do this until the White Lie-man has been put to silence. The Spirits will not hearken to me while he lives. Choose, therefore, whether this impostor shall live to work his evil pleasure, and your cattle perish, or whether he shall receive his due punishment, and your cattle shall be saved.”
His words were drowned in a cry which burst simultaneously from a hundred lips, “Slay the White Wizard; preserve our cattie.”
“Once more, you hear,” exclaimed Chuma; “offer sacrifice or you die; which do you choose? Will you sacrifice?”
“My honoured friend and father,” said Ernest, addressing De Walden in a low voice apart, as he saw that he was about to offer a final refusal, “need this be? Wherefore not comply with their demand? Did not Elijah so challenge the priests of Baal, and God upheld him in the trial. And are you not as truly God’s servant as he was; and God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever? Why should he not answer you, by healing their diseased oxen, even as he answered Elijah, by consuming the sacrifice?”
“It had been revealed to Elijah that he was to act as he did,” returned the missionary in the same tone. “I have received no such intimations, and must not so take upon myself. Our God is indeed the same, and it may please Him to interpose and save me, or leave me to glorify Him by my death; but I must leave that in His hands.” He proceeded aloud, “No, chief, I will not offer the sacrifice you require. I cannot explain my reasons now, but I refuse.”
“Then you shall die, and that speedily. Take him to his hut, until the preparations are made; and be careful that he does not escape, or your own lives shall be the penalty. Take the other whites, and keep them in safe custody also. We will determine in the council what is to be done with them presently.”
The four Englishmen were dragged off under Kobo’s charge, the latter heaping every possible insult upon them during their conveyance to the hut, and ordering the men under his charge to bind them with rhinoceros thongs, which cut them so severely, that even the attendants seemed inclined to remonstrate at such needless severity. But Kobo silenced them by threatening to report their lukewarmness to the chief. Then desiring that the guns and everything belonging to them should be removed, and placed for security in his hut, he withdrew with a parting menace, to take his place at the council about to be held in the chief’s residence.
The lads were too deeply moved at the approaching execution of their friend, and the danger impending over themselves, to feel the disgust and indignation at Kobo’s double-faced treachery, which at another time it would have provoked. They listened reverently to the words addressed to them by De Walden; who warned them that their position was one of the greatest peril, and though he earnestly hoped that their lives might be spared, they would do wisely to be prepared for the worst. “God’s providential care for you,” he said, “has been shown so often and so signally of late, that I need not bid you to trust wholly in Him. But it would be no kindness in me not to warn you that your present peril is very great—as great perhaps as it was in the Hottentot village, though at first sight it might not seem to be so.”
“Not all of us are in imminent danger, I hope,” said Warley. “I know they are angry with me, almost as much as they are with you, but they have no grounds of quarrel with Frank or Gilbert.”
“I thought you might suppose so,” returned the missionary, “and that was the reason why I spoke. It is plain that they mean to put me to a speedy death—”