Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. “Well, I came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a nigger man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a word to a nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as cool as can be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked her to give him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn’t think anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging about the camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and asked me for a lot of cartridges. She’d never asked me for anything before. I asked her what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and she said the old nigger woman who helped carry in water to the garden said she couldn’t stay and help her any more unless she got some cartridges to give her son who was going up north hunting elephants. The woman got over me to give her the cartridges because she was going to have a kid, and she said she couldn’t do the watering without help. So I gave them her. I never put two and two together.

“Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with the Matabele, I thought I’d volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to be got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought I’d only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women there, and a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I told them not to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to keep an eye on them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said the Mashonas didn’t love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out that they loved them better than they loved us. They’ve got the damned impertinence to say, that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but the white man oppresses them all the time!