xtraordinary in the way of a fighter, for he scattered a
clear dozen of them, and sent them flying for their lives. One man
said that when he was safe he looked back. The white man, with the
assegai on his shoulder, was stumping ahead into the infected
village, and the girl she was lying down at the edge of the water
drinking avidly. She hadn't even looked up at the fight."

Father Bates nodded. "Poor creatures," he said. "Yes?"

"Well, the cordon being broken, those of the villagers who weren't
too far gone to walk on their feet promptly scattered, naturally, and
no one tried to stop them. When at last the people from the
neighboring kraals plucked up courage to go and look at the place,
they found there only the bodies of the dead. The white man had gone,
too. They never saw him again, but from time to time there came
rumors from the north and east tales of a wanderer who injected
himself suddenly into men's affairs, withdrew again and went away,
and they remembered the white man who roared. He was already passing
into a myth.

"I couldn't make head nor tail of the thing; but one point was clear.
Since this white man had neither Kaffirs nor gear he couldn't hurt my
river, and that was what chiefly mattered to me just then. I might
have forgotten him altogether, but that I came on his tracks again,
and then, to finish with, I saw the man himself."

"Eh?" Father Bates looked up.

"I'm telling you the whole thing, Padre. You keep quiet and you'll
hear."

The sad evening light was falling, and the faint breeze from the sea
had a touch of chill in it.

"Keep your blankets up, Dan," said the Father.

"You bet," replied Dan. "Well, about this fellow I'm telling you of!
He must have been getting a reputation for uncanniness from every
village he touched at. By the time I came up with the scene of his
next really notable doings he was umtagati in full form supernatural,
you know, a thing to be dreaded and conciliated. And I don't wonder,
really. Here was a man without weapons, bareheaded in the sun,
speaking no word of any native language, alone and nearly naked,
plunging ahead through that wild unknown country and no harm coming
to him. You can't play tricks of that sort with Africa; the old girl
holds too many trumps; but this chap was doing it. It was against
Nature.

"He'd made his way up to a place where I always expect trouble. There
is, or rather, there was then a brute of a chief there, a fellow
named N'Ko