sition of all that has
happened. It is not possible for me to live with the charge of
having been concerned in the shooting of a white man hanging over
me that might be brought up at any time, perhaps when no one was
left in the country to give evidence on my behalf, for then, even
if I were acquitted my name would always be tarnished. In
Zululand, on the other hand, there are no magistrates before whom
I could depose, and if this business should come out, I can
always say that we went there to escape from the Basutos. Now I
am going to get down to see if the horses are all right. Do you
two talk the thing over and make up your minds. Whatever you
agree on, I shall accept and do my best to carry through." Then,
without waiting for an answer, I slipped from the cart.

Having examined the horses, who were cropping all the grass
within reach of them, I crept to the wall of the kraal so as to
be quite out of earshot. The night was now pitch dark, dark as
it only knows how to be in Africa. More, a thunderstorm was
coming up of which that flash of sheet lightning had been a
presage. The air was electric. From the vast bush-clad valley
beneath us came a wild, moaning sound caused, I suppose, by wind
among the trees, though here I felt none; far away a sudden spear
of lightning stabbed the sky. The brooding trouble of nature
spread to my own heart. I was afraid, and not of our present
dangers, though these were real enough, so real that in a few
hours we might all be dead.

To dangers I was accustomed; for years they had been my daily
food by day and by night, and, as I think I have said elsewhere,
I am a fatalist, one who knows full well that when God wants me
He will take me; that is if He can want such a poor, erring
creature. Nothing that I did or left undone could postpone or
hasten His summons for a moment, though of course I knew it to be
my duty to fight against death and to avoid it for as long as I
might, because that I should do so was a portion of His plan.
For we are all part of a great pattern, and the continuance or
cessation of our lives re-acts upon other lives, and therefore
life is a trust.

No, it was of greater things that I felt afraid, things terrible
and imminent which I could not grasp and much less understand. I
understand them now, but who would have guessed that on the issue
of that whispered colloquy in the cart behind me, depended the
fate of a people and many thousands of lives