Yet all the while I knew that I could do nothing in the way of interposition; I was as utterly helpless as though I had been a thousand miles away, instead of sitting there within arm’s length of the man who was responsible for it all. For supposing that I should be crazy enough to obey that impulse, what would happen? Why, the king’s guards would be upon me in a second, and I should be hacked to pieces by their terrible bangwans in the drawing of a single breath, while probably an even worse fate would befall my hapless followers! No, of course, the idea was madness, the act an impossibility; yet when a few minutes later I saw the tall induna, Logwane—Mapela’s friend—led forth and mercilessly done to death, I could not refrain from leaning toward the king and murmuring:
“O King, your witch doctors are not infallible; they made a dreadful mistake when they smelled out that man! Among all your subjects none was more loyal and faithful than Logwane. Why did you suffer him to be slain?”
The king glowered at me for a moment, his eyes smouldering with suppressed anger. Then he answered coldly:
“White man, I believed Logwane to be all that you say. But I was mistaken, for my witch doctors cannot err; no man can hide his guilt from them: and had Logwane not harboured treachery in his heart they would not have smelled him out. Therefore I suffered him to be slain. No man may think evil of me and continue to live.”
At this moment Machenga, who seemed to have gradually sunk into a kind of trance, rose slowly to his feet, and, with fixed, glassy eyes staring straight before him, began to mutter to himself in a voice pitched so low that at first I could distinguish nothing of what he said. Then he began to glide slowly round in a very small circle, and I perceived that presently, when he faced me, he raised his head and sniffed the air strongly. This occurred three times, and upon the third occasion I detected that for an instant the fixed, glassy stare of his eyes gave place to a lightning-like glance of triumphant malignity; and then I knew that his entire pose was merely a piece of exceedingly clever acting, and that he was no more in a trance than I was. When he had completed the fourth half-circle he halted, at a distance of about ten yards from where I was sitting, and, with his back turned toward me, proceeded to sniff the air still more strongly.
“Yes,” he presently exclaimed in a voice quite loud enough for the king and me to hear, “I am not deceived, I smell him; though his skin is white his heart is black, and I smell the evil thoughts against the Great, Great One that lurk deep down in it!” And a smile of diabolical malice overspread his evil face as he shook his great spear aloft and began to dance very slowly, singing softly to himself.
So that was it—the villain was actually going to smell me out! But—“Not if I know it,” thought I; and starting to my feet as I drew a pistol from my belt and levelled it at him, I cried:
“Halt there, Machenga! Halt, I say, or thou diest! Deceiver and murderer, destroyer of the king’s most faithful friends, and giver of evil counsel to the Great, Great One, my magic tells me that in that evil heart of thine thou hast conceived the design to slay me, because when thou didst come secretly to my wagon last night I refused to give thee one of my magic fire tubes. Now I will prove thee, rascal; I will show the king that thou, his chief witch doctor forsooth, art nothing but a base pretender, a player upon his credulity. Thou dost claim to be a great and powerful magician; well, so am I. Kill me, if thou canst; and it shall be that he of us two who kills the other shall be the more powerful magician, and shall also be the one whose mouth speaks the truth.”
Meanwhile, during this interlude, brief as it was, five new victims—two of them indunas—had been smelled out and brought forward; but the king, intent only upon what was passing between Machenga and myself, had forborne to give the fatal signal to the Slayers, and thus the little
