to
occupy and hold the head kraal, and the country was clear of them,
and the white man's credit as a magic worker stood higher than ever.
He could have had anything he liked in any of the kraals for the
asking; he could have been law-giver, king, and god. But he was off
in the bush again, alone and restless and mysterious, with his
ivory-white face and his eyes full of pain and anger."

"Aye," said Father Bates. "Pain and anger that's what it was! And at
last you saw him yourself, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Dan. "I saw him. I was at my river then, combing the gold
out of it, when a Kaffir trekking down told me of him. He was at a
kraal fifty miles away two days' journey, lying, up with a hurt foot.
The gold was coming out of that river by the bottleful; it wasn't a
thing to take one's eyes off for a moment; but a white man, the white
man who had killed N'Komo well, I couldn't keep away. I spun a yarn
to my men about lion spoor that I wanted to follow, and off I went by
myself and did that fifty miles of bush and six-foot grass and rocks
in thirty hours, which was pretty good, considerin'. It was afternoon
when I came through a patch of palms and saw the kraal lying just
beyond.

"I hadn't much of an idea what kind of man I expected to see. I
rather fancy I expected to be disappointed to find him nothing out of
the way after all, and to learn that nine-tenths of the yarns about
him were just nigger lies. I was thinking all that as I stopped in
the palms' shade to mop the sweat out of my hat, and then I saw him!

"He was passing between me and the huts, a strange lame figure,
leaning on a stick, with a few rags of clothing bound about him. His
head, with its matted thick hair, was bare to the thresh of the sun;
he was thick-set, shortish, slow-moving, a sorrowful and laborious
figure. I saw the shine of his bare skin, and even the droop and
sorrow of his heavy face. I stood and watched him for perhaps a
minute in the shadow under those great masts of palms; I saw him as
clearly as I see you; and suddenly a light came to me and I knew I
understood it all. His loneliness, his pain and anger, his wanderings
in that savage wilderness, the wild misery of his eyes and the
ivory-white of his stricken face I understood completely. He had run
away from the sight of men of his own color he would have no use for
me. So then and there I turned and went back through the palms and
started on the trek for my own camp. It was all I