ething dreadful,
I pushed my way through the bush to where he was. There, bound to the
trunk of a tree, sat a young woman, evidently the mother of the child,
for it clung to her leg.

Thank God she was still living, though she must have died before another
day dawned. We cut her loose, and the Zulu hunters, who are kind folk
enough when they are not at war, carried her to camp. In the end with
much trouble we saved the lives of that mother and child. I sent for the
two Mazitus, with whom I could by now talk fairly well, and asked them
why the slavers did these things.

They shrugged their shoulders and one of them answered with a rather
dreadful laugh:

"Because, Chief, these Arabs, being black-hearted, kill those who can
walk no more, or tie them up to die. If they let them go they might
recover and escape, and it makes the Arabs sad that those who have been
their slaves should live to be free and happy."

"Does it? Does it indeed?" exclaimed Stephen with a snort of rage that
reminded me of his father. "Well, if ever I get a chance I'll make them
sad with a vengeance."

Stephen was a tender-hearted young man, and for all his soft and
indolent ways, an awkward customer when roused.

Within forty-eight hours he got his chance, thus: That day we camped
early for two reasons. The first was that the woman and child we had
rescued wee so weak they could not walk without rest, and we had no men
to spare to carry them; the second that we came to an ideal spot to
pass the night. It was, as usual, a deserted village through which ran a
beautiful stream of water. Here we took possession of some outlying huts
with a fence round them, and as Mavovo had managed to shoot a fat eland
cow and her half-grown calf, we prepared to have a regular feast. Whilst
Sammy was making some broth for the rescued woman, and Stephen and I
smoked our pipes and watched him, Hans slipped through the broken gate
of the thorn fence, or _boma_, and announced that Arabs were coming, two
lots of them with many slaves.

We ran out to look and saw that, as he had said, two caravans were
approaching, or rather had reached the village, but at some distance
from us, and were now camping on what had once been the market-place.
One of these was that whose track we had followed, although during the
last few hours of our march we had struck away from it, chiefly because
we could not bear such sights as I have described. It seemed to comprise
about two hundre