"Ssh! You'll get a temperature," warned Father Bates. "Yes; I can imagine it. It makes me humble."
"You see, I know what had maddened him. The first work of N'Komo's I ever saw was a young mother and a baby dead and and finished with, and it nearly sent me off my head. If I'd been half the man this poor beggar was I'd have had N'Komo's skin salted and sun-dried before I slept. He he didn't wait to mourn about things; he went straight ahead to find the man who had done them and deal with him.
"Probably they took him for a lunatic; at any rate, they soon began to laugh at him, shaking and talking in their midst. He was a new thing to have sport with, and N'Komo presently leaned forward, grinning, touched him on the arm, and pointed. The white man's eyes followed the black finger to where a poor devil lay on the ground, impaled by a stake through his stomach. It was N'Komo's way of telling him what to expect, and he understood. He stopped talking.
"The nigger who saw it all and told me about it said that when he had looked round on all the horrors he turned again towards N'Komo, and at the sight of his eyes N'Komo ceased to grin. His big brute face went all to bits, as a Kaffir's does when he is frightened. But the white man made a little backward jerk with his hand that's what it seemed like to the nigger who told me and suddenly, from nowhere in particular, a big pistol materialized in his grip. He must have been pretty clever at the draw. His hand came up, there was a smart little crack, a spit of smoke, and N'Komo, the great war chief, was rolling on the ground, making horrible noises like like bad plumbing, with half his throat shot away, and the man who had done it was backing towards the main gate with the big revolver swinging to right and left across the group of warriors.
"And he got away, too. That, really, is the most wonderful part of the whole thing. I expect that as soon as N'Komo was settled, the usual row and the usual murders began by various would-be successors. By night they had all started north again, on a hot-foot race to occupy and hold the head kraal, and the country was clear of them, and the white man's credit as a magic worker stood higher than ever. He could have had anything he liked in any of the kraals for the asking; he could have been law-giver, king, and god. But he was off in the bush again, alone and restless and mysterious, with his ivory-white face and his eyes full of pain and anger."
"Aye," said Father Bates. "Pain and anger that's what it was! And at last you saw him yourself, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Dan. "I saw him. I was at my river then, combing the gold out of it, when a Kaffir trekking down told me of him. He was at a kraal fifty miles away two days' journey, lying, up with a hurt foot. The gold was coming out of that river by the bottleful; it wasn't a thing to take one's eyes off for a moment; but a white man, the white man who had killed N'Komo well, I couldn't keep away. I spun a yarn to my men about lion spoor that I wanted to follow, and off I went by myself and did that fifty miles of bush and six-foot grass and rocks in thirty hours, which was pretty good, considerin'. It was afternoon when I came through a patch of palms and saw the kraal lying just beyond.
"I hadn't much of an idea what kind of man I expected to see. I rather fancy I expected to be disappointed to find him nothing out of the way after all, and to learn that nine-tenths of the yarns about him were just nigger lies. I was thinking all that as I stopped in the palms' shade to mop the sweat out of my hat, and then I saw him!
"He was passing between me and the huts, a strange lame figure, leaning on a stick, with a few rags of clothing bound about him. His head, with its matted thick hair, was bare to the thresh of the sun; he was thick-set, shortish, slow-moving, a sorrowful and laborious figure. I saw the shine of his bare skin, and even the droop and sorrow of his heavy face. I stood and watched him for perhaps a minute in the shadow under those great masts of palms; I saw him as clearly as I see you; and suddenly a light came to me and I knew I understood it all. His loneliness, his pain and anger, his wanderings in that savage wilderness, the wild misery of his eyes and the ivory-white of his stricken face I understood completely. He had run away from the sight of men of his own color he would have no use for me. So then and there I turned and went back through the palms and started on the trek for my own camp. It was all I could do for him."
"But," said Father Bates, "you've not said what it was that you saw."