“The creature had caught his ankle with both hands, the fingers, hard and shovel-ended, pressing into his flesh.
“‘Let go!’ cried Shadrach, and struck at the man with his sjambok.
“The man bounded on all fours to evade the blow, but it took him in the flank, and he was human—or Kafir—again in a moment, and rubbed himself and whimpered quite naturally.
“‘Let me see no more of your baboon tricks,’ stormed Shadrach, the more angry because he had been frightened. ‘Keep them for your friends among the rocks. And now, be off to your kraal.’
“That night again the Kafirs drummed all about the green corn, and sang in chorus the song which the mountain Kafirs sing when the new moon shows like a paring from a finger-nail of gold. It is a long and very loud song, with stamping of feet every minute, and again the baboons came down to see and listen. The Kafirs saw them, many hundreds of humped black shapes, and sang the louder, while the crowd of beasts grew ever denser as fresh parties came down and joined it. It was opposite the rocks on which they sat that the singing-men collected, roaring their long verses and clattering on the buckets, doubtless not without some intention to jeer at and flout the baffled baboons that watched them in such a silence. It was drooping now to the pit of night, and things were barely seen as shapes, when from higher up the line, where the guardians of the crops were sparser, there came a discord of shrieks.
“‘The baboons are through the line!’ 470 they cried; and it was on that instant that the great watching army of apes came leaping in a charge on the main force of the Kafirs. Oh, but that was a wild, a haunting thing! Great, bull-headed dog-baboons, with naked fangs and clutching hands alert for murder; bounding mothers of squealing litters that led their young in a dash to the fight; terrible, lean old bitches that made for the men when others went for the corn,—they swooped like a flood of horror on the aghast Kafirs, biting, tearing, bounding through the air like uncouth birds; and in one second the throng of the Kafirs melted before them, and they were amid the corn.
“Eight men they killed by rending, and of the others, some sixty, there was not one but had his wound—some bite to the bone, some gash where iron fingers had clutched and torn their way through skin and flesh. When they came to Shadrach and woke him wearily, with the breathless timidity of beaten men, it was already too late to go with a gun to the corn-lands. The baboons had contented themselves with small plunder after their victory, and withdrew orderly to the hills; and, even as Shadrach came to the door of the homestead, he saw the last of their marshaled line, black against the sky, moving swiftly towards the kloofs.
“He flung out his hands like a man in despair, with never a word to ease his heart, and then the old Shangaan Kafir stood up before him. He had the upper part of his right arm bitten to the bone and worried, and now he cast back the blanket from his shoulder and held out the quivering wound to his master.
“‘It was the chief of the baboons that gave me this,’ he said, ‘and he is a baboon only in the night. He came through the ranks of them, bounding like a boulder on a steep hillside, and it was for me that his teeth were bared. So, when he hung by his teeth to my arm and tore and snarled, I drew my nails across his back, that the baas should know the truth.’
“‘What is this madness?’ cried Shadrach.