“Or kill,” interrupted Tom Brown; “I’ve no faith in Hicks’s skill as a practitioner.”
“Of course not,” said Wilkins, “proverbial philosophy asserts and requires that doctors should disagree.”
“Be that as it may,” continued Pearson, “the native did die and was buried, so that’s an end of him, and yonder sits Jumbo eating his breakfast at the camp-fire as if he had done a most virtuous action. The fact is, I don’t believe the reports. I cannot believe that poor Jumbo, coward though he is, would be guilty of such an act.”
“Perhaps not,” said the major, rising, “but there’s no possibility of settling the question now, and here comes Hicks, so I’ll go and make arrangements with him about the day’s proceedings.”
“They have a primitive mode of conducting funerals here,” said Tom Brown when the major had left. “I happened to be up at the kraal currying favour with the chief man, for he has the power of bothering us a good deal if he chooses, and I observed what they did with this same dead man. I saw that he was very low as I passed the hut where he lay, and stopped to look on. His breath was very short, and presently he fell into what either might have been a profound sleep, or a swoon, or death; I could not be quite sure which, not being used to black fellows. I would have examined the poor man, but the friends kicked up a great row and shoved me off. Before the breath could have been well out of his body, they hoisted him up and carried him away to burial. I followed out of mere curiosity, and found that the lazy rascals had shoved the body into an ant-eater’s hole in order to save the trouble of digging a grave.”
While Tom and his friends were thus conversing over their pipes, their attention was attracted by a peculiar cry or howl of terror, such as they had never heard from any animal of those regions. Starting up they instinctively grasped their guns and looked about them. The utterer of the cry was soon obvious in the person of Jumbo, who had leaped up suddenly—overturning his breakfast in the act—and stood gazing before him with his eyes starting out of their sockets, his teeth rattling together like a pair of castanets, his limbs quivering, and in fact his whole person displaying symptoms of the most abject terror of which the human frame is capable.
The major and Hicks, who stood not far from him, were both unusually pale in the face, as they gazed motionless before them.
The fixedness of their looks directed the eyes of Tom Brown and his comrades towards a neighbouring thicket, where they beheld an object that was well calculated to inspire dread. It appeared to be a living skeleton covered with a black skin of the most ghastly appearance, and came staggering towards them like a drunken man. As it drew nearer Jumbo’s limbs trembled more and more violently and his face became of a leaden blue colour. At last he became desperate, turned round, dashed right through the embers of the fire, and fled wildly from the spot with a howl that ended in a shriek of terror.
“No wonder he’s terrified,” observed Tom Brown to his alarmed comrades; “I felt more than half certain the nigger was not dead last night, and now it is beyond question that they had buried him alive. Jumbo evidently thinks it’s his ghost!”
“Won’t he give his friend a fright?” said Wilkins, on observing that the poor man went staggering on in the direction of the kraal.