“Oh,” said Peter, sitting up, the look of wonder passing from his face. “So that’s it, is it? Is it diamonds, or gold, or lands?”

“We are the most vast of all companies on the earth,” said the stranger; “and we are always growing. We have among us men of every race and from every land; the Esquimo, the Chinaman, the Turk, and the Englishman, we have of them all. We have men of every religion, Buddhists, Mahomedans, Confucians, Freethinkers, Atheists, Christians, Jews. It matters to us nothing by what name the man is named, so he be one of us.”

And Peter said, “It must be hard for you all to understand one another, if you are of so many different kinds?”

The stranger answered, “There is a sign by which we all know one another, and by which all the world may know us.” (By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.)

And Peter said, “What is that sign?”

But the stranger was silent.

“Oh, a kind of freemasonry!” said Peter, leaning on his elbow towards the stranger, and looking up at him from under his pointed cap. “Are there any more of you here in this country?”

“There are,” said the stranger. Then he pointed with his hand into the darkness. “There in a cave were two women. When you blew the cave up they were left unhurt behind a fallen rock. When you took away all the grain, and burnt what you could not carry, there was one basketful that you knew nothing of. The women stayed there, for one was eighty, and one near the time of her giving birth; and they dared not set out to follow the remnant of their tribe because you were in the plains below. Every day the old woman doled grain from the basket; and at night they cooked it in their cave where you could not see their smoke; and every day the old woman gave the young one two handfuls and kept one for herself, saying, ‘Because of the child within you.’ And when the child was born and the young woman strong, the old woman took a cloth and filled it with all the grain that was in the basket; and she put the grain on the young woman’s head and tied the child on her back, and said, ‘Go, keeping always along the bank of the river, till you come north to the land where our people are gone; and some day you can send and fetch me.’ And the young woman said, ‘Have you corn in the basket to last till they come?’ And she said, ‘I have enough.’ And she sat at the broken door of the cave and watched the young woman go down the hill and up the river bank till she was hidden by the bush; and she looked down at the plain below, and she saw the spot where the kraal had been and where she had planted mealies when she was a young girl—”