It may have lasted half an hour when one of our party said, “That’s Bob’s old driver, the big Zulu. There’ll be a row to-night; he’s with a foreigner chap from Natal now. New chums are always roughest on the niggers.”
In a flash I remembered Bob Saunderson’s story of the boy who had caught the lion alive, and Bob’s own words, “a real fine nigger, but a terror to drink, and always in trouble. He fairly wore me right out.”
A few minutes later there was a short scuffle, and the boy’s voice could be heard protesting in the same deep low tone: they were tying him up to the waggon-wheel for a flogging. Others were helping the white man, but the boy was not resisting.
At the second thin whistling stroke some one said, “That’s a sjambok he’s using, not a nek-strop!” Sjambok, that will cut a bullock’s hide! At about the eighth there was a wrench that made the waggon rattle, and the deep voice was raised in protest, “Ow, Inkos!”
It made me choke: it was the first I knew of such things, and the horror of it was unbearable; but the man who had spoken before—a good man too, straight and strong, and trusted by black and white—said, “Sonny, you must not interfere between a man and his boys here; it’s hard sometimes, but we’d not live a day if they didn’t know who was baas.”
I think we counted eighteen; and then everything seemed going to burst.
The white man looked about at the faces close to him—and stopped. He began slowly to untie the outstretched arms, and blustered out some threats. But no one said a word!
The noises died down as the night wore on, until the stillness was broken only by the desultory barking of a kaffir dog or the crowing of some awakened rooster who had mistaken the bright moonlight for the dawn and thought that all the world had overslept itself. But for me there was one other sound for which I listened into the cool of morning with the quivering sensitiveness of a bruised nerve. Sometimes it was a long catchy sigh, and sometimes it broke into a groan just audible, like the faintest rumble of most distant surf. Twice in the long night there came the same request to one of the boys near him, uttered in a deep clear unshaken voice and in a tone that was civil but firm, and strangely moving from its quiet indifference.
“Landela manzi, Umganaam!” (“Bring water, friend!”) was all he said; and each time the request was so quickly answered that I had the guilty feeling of being one in a great conspiracy of silence. The hush was unreal; the stillness alive with racing thoughts; the darkness full of watching eyes.