ro ("The Diggers") to secure admission to the caste.
Three lateral cuts on either cheek was the mark of the M'gimi--wounds
made, upon the warrior's initiation to the order, with the razor-edged
blade of a killing-spear. They lived apart in three camps to the number
of six thousand men, and for five years from the hour of their
initiation they neither married nor courted. The M'gimi turned their
backs to women, and did not suffer their presence in their camps. And if
any man departed from this austere rule he was taken to the Breaking
Tree, his four limbs were fractured, and he was hoisted to the lower
branches, between which a litter was swung, and his regiment sat beneath
the tree neither eating, drinking nor sleeping until he died. Sometimes
this was a matter of days. As for the woman who had tempted his eye and
his tongue, she was a witness.

Thus the M'gimi preserved their traditions of austerity. They were
famous walkers and jumpers. They threw heavy spears and fought great
sham-fights, and they did every violent exercise save till the ground.

This was the sum and substance of the complaint which had at last come
to a head.

S'gono, the spokesman of The Diggers, was a headman of the inner lands,
and spoke with bitter prejudice, since his own son had been rejected by
the M'gimi captains as being unworthy.

"Shall we men dig and sow for such as these?" he asked. "Now give a
judgment, King! Every moon we must take the best of our fruit and the
finest of our fish. Also so many goats and so much salt, and it is
swallowed up."

"Yet if I send them away," said the king, "how shall I protect this land
against the warriors of the Akasava and the evil men of the swamp? Also
of the Ochori, who are four days' march across good ground?"

"Lord King," said S'gono, "are there no M'gimi amongst us who have
passed from the camp and have their women and their children? May not
these take the spear again? And are not we M'joro folk men? By my life!
I will raise as many spears from The Diggers and captain them with
M'joro men--this I could do between the moons and none would say that
you were not protected. For we are men as bold as they."

The king saw that the M'gimi party was in the minority. Moreover, he had
little sympathy with the warrior caste, for his beginnings were basely
rooted in the soil, and two of his sons had no more than scraped into
the M'gimi.

"This thing shall be done," said the king, and the roar of app