Harley Greenoak was not sorry to exchange the riot and racket outside for the cool interior of the young chief’s hut. The latter was by no means as neat and clean as he had been wont to find in similar dwellings among the Zulus; because the Xosa has a sort of passion for grease—and dogs. Two of the latter got up growling as he entered, but slunk out of the doorway with astonishing celerity at a peremptory word from their master. Then two of Matanzima’s wives appeared, bearing food, in the shape of stamped mealies and curdled milk, also a large calabash of native beer, and here again there was a suggestion of but half-washed vessels, and a flavour of grease and red-ochre seemed to permeate the stuff itself. But to Greenoak little matters of this sort were the merest trifles.

“It is good to see you again, Kulondeka,” said the young chief, when breakfast was well under way. “Now—what is the news?”

“News? Why as for that, son of Sandili, the news is great.”

“Great?”

“It is. And such as it is I bring it from—no further distance from here than I could shoot with this gun.”

“Ha!”

The ejaculation, quick and eager; a sudden intensity wherewith the answer had been received was not lost on Harley Greenoak. As we heard him tell the Commandant, he was here to feel the pulse of the people. Already he had got his finger upon it.

“The people are mad, son of the Great Chief,” he went on. “Mad—quite mad. The people here.”

Matanzima laughed—and it struck his hearer there was a note of great relief in the tone.

“Why, as to that, Kulondeka,” he said, “they are only a little excited. They are all young men, those out yonder. They have been dancing all night, and have not worn it off. But—mad? Au!”

“And Mafutana, and Sikonile, and others who gave me speech on the way hither—are they young men, and have they been dancing all night?” said Greenoak, innocently, and with his head on one side. “They talked ‘dark’ as they followed on behind me, but—not dark enough, son of Sandili. Ah—ah—not dark enough. They are mad. Shall I say why?”

The young chief nodded and uttered a murmur of assent.

“Then why are the children of the House of Gaika preparing for war?”

This was putting things straightly. Matanzima brought his hand to his mouth with a quick exclamation. Then, laughing softly, he shook his head.

“Now, nay, Kulondeka,” he said. “You are my father, but your dreams have been bad. The war was not with us, and it is over now. And I would ask—If we sat still then, if we did not rise in our might to aid our brethren over yonder, would it not be the act of fools and madmen to rise now, when there is no one to aid, and the whites are all armed and prepared? Now, would it not?”

“It would. It would be the act of just such as these. That is why I say that the news I bring is that your people are all mad, Matanzima.”

The latter did not immediately answer, and Greenoak sat and watched him. Such words, uttered by any other man, would have been equivalent to the signing of his death-warrant. But Greenoak knew his ground. He had saved the life of the young chief once, and he knew that the latter would never forget it as long as he lived. Moreover, between the two there was a very genuine liking, and a longing to save this fine young fool from the ruinous consequences of the mad, impracticable scheme on which he was already embarking had borne a full part in moving him to start upon his perilous undertaking.

“Whau! Kulondeka. Are you sent by Iruvumente?” (The Government.)

“Not so, Matanzima. Yet the answers I am getting might well make it appear as though I were. For they are just the answers that might be got ready for a Government commissioner.”

The other laughed again, but just a trifle shamefacedly. He knew, only too well, the utter futility of trying to hoodwink this one man of all others. The latter went on—

“Where are all the cattle belonging to the people? The land here is green and the grass soft and fresh. Who would have thought the pasture in the Gombazana Forest could be better?”

Here again was food for fresh discomfiture. For how should Kulondeka have known so accurately that the tribe had been steadily sending away all its women and children to the wooded fastnesses he had mentioned, in order to have its hands free entirely? Yet what did not Eulondeka know?

“For that,” answered Matanzima, “there may be some reason. The Ama Gcaleka might come over and seize some of our cattle to make up for all your people took from them, what time we did not aid them. Ah—ah! What time we did not aid them,” he added significantly.

“If you feared that, why did you not send word to Bokelo?” said Greenoak, using the name by which the Commandant was known among the tribes. “He would have sent sufficient Amapolise to patrol the border, so that such a thing could not have befallen.”

The look on Matanzima’s face at the mention of such a contingency would have escaped pretty nearly any other man than Harley Greenoak. Him it did not escape. Yes. He was getting his finger more and............