they were back again in their kopjes, leaving
devastation and foulness wherever they passed.

"It was my stepsister's husband that stood on one leg and cursed like
a Jew. He was wrathful as a Hollander that has been drinking water,
and what did not help to make him content was the fact that hardly
anything would avail to protect his lands. Once the baboons had tasted
the sweetness of the young corn, they would come again and again,
camping in the kloofs overhead as long as anything remained for them,
like a deaf guest. But, for all that, he had no notion of leaving them
to plunder at their ease. The least one can do with an unwelcome
visitor is to make him uncomfortable; and he sent to certain kraals on
the farm for two old Kafirs he had remarked who had the appearance of
cunning old men.

"They came and squatted before him, squirming and shuffling, as Kafirs
do when a white man talks to them. One was quite a common kind of
Kafir, gone a little gray with age, a tuft of white wool on his chin
and little patches of it here and there on his head. But the other was
a small, twisted, yellow man, with no hair at all, and eyes like
little blots of fire on a charred stick; and his arms were so long and
gnarled and lean that he had a bestial look, like a laborious animal.

"'The baboons have killed the crop on the lower lands,' said Shadrach,
smacking his leg with his sjambok. 'If they are not checked, they will
destroy all the corn on this farm. What is the way to go about it?'

"The little yellow man was biting his lips and turning a straw in his
hands, and gave no answer; but the other spoke.

"'I am from Shangaanland,' he said, 'and there, when the baboons
plague us, we have a way with them, a good way.'

"He sneered sideways at his yellow companion as he spoke, and the look
which the latter returned to him was a thing to shrink from.

"'What is this way?' demanded Shadrach.

"'You must trap a baboon,' explained the old Kafir,--'a leading
baboon, for choice, who has a lot to say in the government of the
troop; and then you must skin him, and let him go again. The others
will travel miles and miles as soon as they see him, and never come
back again.'

"'It makes me sick to think of it,' said Shadrach. 'Surely you know
some other way of scaring them?'

"The old Kafir shook his head slowly, but the yellow man ceased to
smile and play with the straw, and spoke:

"'I do not believe in that way, baas. A Shangaan baboo