? As I was to learn
in days to come, if Anscombe and Heda had determined upon heading
for the Transvaal, there would, as I believe, have been no Zulu
war, which in its turn meant that there would have been no Boer
Rebellion and that the mysterious course of history would have
been changed.

I shook myself together and returned to the cart.

"Well," I whispered, but there was no answer. A moment later
there came another flash of lightning.

"There," said Heda, "how many do you make it?

"Ninety-eight," he answered.

"I counted ninety-nine," she said, "but anyway it was within the
hundred. Mr. Quatermain, we will go to Zululand, if you please,
if you will show us the way there."

"Right," I answered, "but might I ask what that has to do with
your both counting a hundred?"

"Only this," she said, "we could not make up our minds. Maurice
was for the Transvaal, I was for Zululand. So you see we agreed
that if another flash came before we counted a hundred, we would
go to Zululand, and if it didn't, to Pretoria. A very good way
of settling, wasn't it?"

"Excellent!" I replied, "quite excellent for those who could
think of such a thing."

As a matter of fact I don't know which of them thought of it
because I never inquired. But I did remember afterwards how
Anscombe had tossed with a lucky penny when it was a question
whether we should or should not run for the wagon during our
difficulty by the Oliphant's River; also when I asked him the
reason for this strange proceeding he answered that Providence
might inhabit a penny as well as anything else, and that he
wished to give it--I mean Providence--a chance. How much more
then, he may have argued, could it inhabit a flash of lightning
which has always been considered a divine manifestation from the
time of the Roman Jove, and no doubt far before him.

Forty or fifty generations ago, which is not long, our ancestors
set great store by the behaviour of lightning and thunder, and
doubtless the instinct is still in our blood, in the same way
that all our existing superstitions about the moon come down to
us from the time when our forefathers worshipped her. They did
this for tens of hundreds or thousands of years, and can we
expect a few coatings of the veneer that we politely call
civilization, which after all is only one of our conventions that
vanish in any human stress such as war, to kill out the human
impulse it seems to hide? I do not know, though I