"I couldn't make head nor tail of the thing; but one point was clear. Since this white man had neither Kaffirs nor gear he couldn't hurt my river, and that was what chiefly mattered to me just then. I might have forgotten him altogether, but that I came on his tracks again, and then, to finish with, I saw the man himself."
"Eh?" Father Bates looked up.
"I'm telling you the whole thing, Padre. You keep quiet and you'll hear."
The sad evening light was falling, and the faint breeze from the sea had a touch of chill in it.
"Keep your blankets up, Dan," said the Father.
"You bet," replied Dan. "Well, about this fellow I'm telling you of! He must have been getting a reputation for uncanniness from every village he touched at. By the time I came up with the scene of his next really notable doings he was umtagati in full form supernatural, you know, a thing to be dreaded and conciliated. And I don't wonder, really. Here was a man without weapons, bareheaded in the sun, speaking no word of any native language, alone and nearly naked, plunging ahead through that wild unknown country and no harm coming to him. You can't play tricks of that sort with Africa; the old girl holds too many trumps; but this chap was doing it. It was against Nature.
"He'd made his way up to a place where I always expect trouble. There is, or rather, there was then a brute of a chief there, a fellow named N'Komo, who paid tribute to M'Kombi, and was sort of protected and supported by him. He was always slopping over his borders with a handful of fighting men and burning and slaughtering and raping among the peaceful kraals. A devil he was, a real black devil for cruelty and lust. He had just started on a campaign when this lonely white man arrived in the neighborhood, passing through a bit of district with N'Komo's mark on it in the form of burned huts and bodies of people. A man N'Komo had killed was a sight to make Beelzebub sick. Torture, you know; mutilation beastliness! The white man must have seen a good many such bodies.
"N'Komo and his swashbucklers had slept the night in a captured kraal, and were still there in the morning when the white man arrived. I know exactly the kind of scene it was. The carcasses of the cattle slaughtered for meat would be lying all over the place between the round huts, and bodies of men and women and children with them. The place would be swarming with the tall, black spearmen, each with a skin over his shoulder and about his loins; there would be a fearful jabber, a clatter of voices and laughter and probably screams, horrible screams, from some poor nigger whose death they'd be dragging out, hour after hour, for their fun. Near the main gate N'Komo was holding an indaba with his chief bucks. I've seen him many times a great coal-black brute, six feet four in height, with the flat, foolish, good-natured-looking face that fooled people into thinking him a decent sort. I wish I'd shot him the first time I saw him.
"Well, the indaba, the council, you know was in full swing when up comes this white man, running as if for his life, and wailing, wailing! The Kaffir who told me had seen it from where he was lying, tied hand and foot, waiting his turn for the firebrands and the knives. He said: 'He wailed like one who mourns for the dead!' There was a burnt kraal not a mile away, so one can guess what he had been seeing and was wailing about. 'His face,' the nigger told me, 'was like the face of one who has lived through the torment of N'Komo and is thirsty for death; a face to hide one's eyes before. And it was white and shining like ivory!' He came thus, pelting blindly at a run, into the midst of N'Komo's war indaba.
"He picked out N'Komo as the chief man there in a moment; that was easy enough, and he broke into a torrent of words, gesticulating and pointing back in the direction from which he had come. Telling him of what he had seen, of course poor beggar! Can't you imagine him, with those tall surprised black soldiers all round him and the great dangerous bulk of negro king before him, trying to make them understand, trembling with horror and fury, raging in homely useless English against the everyday iniquity of Africa? Can't you imagine it, Padre?"