"Sure nuff, sah. Nyanza ober dar;" he pointed almost due east; "chief send men too; help sah 'long."
"As a sort of escort, you mean, for I don't want to be carried again. I shan't forget that time in the forest, Mbutu, nor how much I owe to you. I feel years older, somehow; and, by the by, d'you think there's such a thing as a razor in the village? I can't see myself, having no looking-glass, but I feel that during that illness my face has got a trifle downy."
"No razor, sah; Bahima pluck hair out. Muzema-wa-taba do it for sah."
"That's the chief's pipe-lighter, isn't it? No, thanks! let him continue lighting his master's pipe. Talking of that, since everybody smokes here, women included, I feel rather out of it without a pipe too; but really their tobacco is so--well, so intensely aromatic that I don't care to risk it. How that medicine-man scowls at me, by the way." Mabruki had just passed them. "I am extremely sorry to have been the unconscious means of upsetting his apple-cart; and I wish he'd see reason and make friends."
"No like medicine-man," said Mbutu hurriedly, looking over his shoulder at the strange figure departing.
"I wonder what he does in those little fetish-huts all round the village," added Tom. "Come now, d'you think he'd be pleased if I asked him for one of those wooden charms I've seen him gibbering over?"
"Nebber, nebber, sah," returned the boy earnestly. "Sah white man; no want dem things; sah laugh inside."
"Oh, it was only to please the man!--Here's our friend Msala coming. I wonder why the light of his countenance is gone for once."
The katikiro did indeed look unusually grave as he came up. In answer to Mbutu's enquiry, the regular formula "Is it well?" he replied that it was certainly not well, for he had just discovered that one of his best oxen, as well as two of the kasegara's, had died mysteriously during the night. He could not account for it; they had shown no signs of sickness, and none of the other animals were affected. The devil Magaso had hitherto confined his attentions to bananas; it seemed strange if he had suddenly become a destroyer of oxen. One of his Bairo herdsmen, said the katikiro, suggested that Muhoko, another evil spirit, had paid a flying visit to the village; but this suggestion he treated with scorn; he couldn't imagine a Bairo devil having the impudence to interfere with Bahima property. Altogether, the usually genial official was decidedly upset.
"Perhaps they've got poison somehow," said Tom.