was that my twelve trained beasts
came in. By putting six of them to each wagon, two as fore- and two as
after-oxen, and two in the middle, Hans and I were able to get the other
ten necessary to make up a team of sixteen under some sort of control.

Heavens! how we worked during the week or so which went by before it
was possible for me to leave Lorenzo Marquez. What with mending up and
loading the wagons, buying and breaking in the wild oxen, purchasing
provisions, hiring native servants--of whom I was lucky enough to secure
eight who belonged to one of the Zulu tribes and desired to get back to
their own country, whence they had wandered with some Boers, I do not
think that we slept more than two or three hours out of the twenty-four.

But, it may be asked, what was my aim, whither went I, what inquiries
had I made? To answer the last question first, I had made every possible
inquiry, but with little or no result. Marie's letter had said that they
were encamped on the bank of the Crocodile River, about fifty miles from
Delagoa Bay. I asked everyone I met among the Portuguese--who, after
all, were not many--if they had heard of such an encampment of emigrant
Boers. But these Portuguese appeared to have heard nothing, except my
host, Don Jose, who had a vague recollection of something--he could not
remember what.

The fact was at this time the few people who lived at Lorenzo Marquez
were too sodden with liquor and other vices to take any interest in
outside news that did not immediately concern them. Moreover, the
natives whom they flogged and oppressed if they were their servants, or
fought with if they were not, told them little, and almost nothing
that was true, for between the two races there was an hereditary hate
stretching back for generations. So from the Portuguese I gained no
information.

Then I turned to the Kaffirs, especially to those from whom I had bought
the cattle. _They_ had heard that some Boers reached the banks of the
Crocodile moons ago--how many they could not tell. But that country,
they said, was under the rule of a chief who was hostile to them, and
killed any of their people who ventured thither. Therefore they knew
nothing for certain. Still, one of them stated that a woman whom he had
bought as a slave, and who had passed through the district in question
a few weeks before, told him that someone had told her that these Boers
were all dead of sickness. She added that she had seen their wa