Nairn smiled and shook his head.
“I’m afraid,” he answered, “that it was only because you were in a scrape that I sided with you at all. It seemed a bit of a damned shame that the Government should set on a couple of fellows because they had chosen to settle their grievances their own way, which is what you did, I believe?”
Heron smiled grimly, and nodded reply.
“You seem to have had pretty good information about us,” Geddy remarked. “I suppose your neighbours keep you well posted?”
“Yes; there are Boswells among them, too. I have had faithfully retailed to me the whole of the affair of Mahaash and the silver spur. Don’t put another chief to ride a bucking horse with a spur. They may not all fall as lightly as Mahaash, and they may not all be as good-tempered.”
“Upon my soul,” said Heron, “I did it in perfect good faith. He wanted a present, and I gave him what I could best spare. How could I possibly know that that old crock would buck?”
“Well, you had a lucky escape. Umketch would have had you kerried. They don’t like to appear ridiculous. How did you lose your pocket-book, Geddy?”
“How—the—deuce—”
Nairn laughed heartily.
“Why, man, it has been here for weeks, waiting for you! They bring me all these things, with their gossip and their troubles. An old fellow, a witch-doctor, brought the pocket-book. He said he found it by divination—casting the dollas; the old fraud! He walked up here, some forty miles, just to gossip about you. It took him three days before he produced the book. The first day he talked of the prospects of rain, and the grass and the cattle; the next he spoke about the rumours that were afloat about white men working into the ground and bursting it open with guns, and wondered if white men would overrun Swazieland; and he wound up with the admission that he had heard of two having been seen, and on horseback, too, and with rifles. Notwithstanding which, he believed them to be English, for one had given a shilling to a young girl as a present, and the other had a book in which he wrote. There it is on the shelf beside you. He wanted to sell it, but I took it from him, and told him he would probably have bad luck, and one of his cows would be barren or lose her calf this year because he had meddled with your goods, and failed to return the book to you. He stole it, of course?”