“I met a woman with corn on her head and a child on her back!” said Peter under his breath.

“—And tonight I saw her sit again at the door of the cave; and when the sun had set she grew cold; and she crept in and lay down by the basket. Tonight, at half-past three, she will die. I have known her since she was a little child and played about the huts, while her mother worked in the mealie fields. She was one of our company.”

“Oh,” said Peter.

“Other members we have here,” said the stranger. “There was a prospector”—he pointed north; “he was a man who drank and swore when it listed him; but he had many servants, and they knew where to find him in need. When they were ill, he tended them with his own hands; when they were in trouble, they came to him for help. When this war began, and all black men’s hearts were bitter, because certain white men had lied to them, and their envoys had been killed when they would have asked England to put her hand out over them; at that time certain of the men who fought the white men came to the prospector’s hut. And the prospector fired at them from a hole he had cut in his door; but they fired back at him with an old elephant gun, and the bullet pierced his side and he fell on the floor:—because the innocent man suffers oftentimes for the guilty, and the merciful man falls while the oppressor flourishes. Then his black servant who was with him took him quickly in his arms, and carried him out at the back of the hut, and down into the river bed where the water flowed and no man could trace his footsteps, and hid him in a hole in the river wall. And when the men broke into the hut they could find no white man, and no traces of his feet. But at evening, when the black servant returned to the hut to get food and medicine for his master, the men who were fighting caught him, and they said, ‘Oh, you betrayer of your people, white man’s dog, who are on the side of those who take our lands and our wives and our daughters before our eyes; tell us where you have hidden him?’ And when he would not answer them, they killed him before the door of the hut. And when the night came, the white man crept up on his hands and knees, and came to his hut to look for food. All the other men were gone, but his servant lay dead before the door; and the white man knew how it must have happened. He could not creep further, and he lay down before the door, and that night the white man and the black lay there dead together, side by side. Both those men were of my friends.”