thing
before. I asked her what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and
she said the old nigger woman who helped carry in water to the garden
said she couldn't stay and help her any more unless she got some
cartridges to give her son who was going up north hunting elephants. The
woman got over me to give her the cartridges because she was going to
have a kid, and she said she couldn't do the watering without help. So I
gave them her. I never put two and two together.

"Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with the
Matabele, I thought I'd volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to
be got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought
I'd only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women
there, and a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I
told them not to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to
keep an eye on them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said
the Mashonas didn't love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out
that they loved them better than they loved us. They've got the damned
impertinence to say, that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but the
white man oppresses them all the time!

"Well, I left those women there," said Peter, dropping his hands on his
knees. "Mind you, I'd treated those women really well. I'd never given
either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all
the fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn't been gone a
month, when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had
the woman first--he's dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut
door with his throat cut--and what do you think he said to me? Why, I
hadn't been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all the
big one. What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball and
cartridge she could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and even
the lid off the tea-box to melt into bullets for the old muzzle-loaders
they have; and off she went, and took the young one too. The fellow
wrote me they didn't touch another thing: they left the shawls and
dresses I gave them kicking about the huts, and went off naked with only
their blankets and the ammunition on their heads. A nigger man met them
twenty miles off, and he said they were skooting up for Lo Magundi's
country as fast as they could go.

"And do you know," said Peter, striking his knee, and looking
impressively