“Well, I left those women there,” said Peter, dropping his hands on his knees. “Mind you, I’d treated those women really well. I’d never given either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all the fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn’t been gone a month, when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had the woman first—he’s dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut door with his throat cut—and what do you think he said to me? Why, I hadn’t been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all the big one. What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball and cartridge she could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and even the lid off the tea-box to melt into bullets for the old muzzle-loaders they have; and off she went, and took the young one too. The fellow wrote me they didn’t touch another thing: they left the shawls and dresses I gave them kicking about the huts, and went off naked with only their blankets and the ammunition on their heads. A nigger man met them twenty miles off, and he said they were skooting up for Lo Magundi’s country as fast as they could go.

“And do you know,” said Peter, striking his knee, and looking impressively across the fire at the stranger; “what I’m as sure of as that I’m sitting here? It’s that that nigger I caught at my hut, that day, was her nigger husband! He’d come to fetch her that time; and when she saw she couldn’t get away without our catching her, she got the cartridges for him!” Peter paused impressively between the words. “And now she’s gone back to him. It’s for him she’s taken that ammunition!”

Peter looked across the fire at the stranger, to see what impression his story was making.

“I tell you what,” said Peter, “if I’d had any idea that day who that bloody nigger was, the day I saw him standing at my door, I’d have given him one cartridge in the back of his head more than ever he reckoned for!” Peter looked triumphantly at the stranger. This was his only story; and he had told it a score of times round the camp fire for the benefit of some new-comer. When this point was reached, a low murmur of applause and sympathy always ran round the group: tonight there was quiet; the stranger’s large dark eyes watched the fire almost as though he heard nothing.