Your father came to seek me in the place you know, and was carried home badly wounded for his pains, but whether he lived or died I cannot tell you, but I heard that your mother, the good Vrouw Botmar, is very sick, for things have so fallen out lately that her mind is troubled, and she flies to drink to comfort it." Now when she heard this, Sihamba could keep silence no longer, but cried in a mocking voice: "Get you gone, Bull-Head, and take lessons in lying from your friends of my trade, the Kaffir witch-doctors, for never before did I hear a man bear false witness so clumsily.

On the third night of his illness the husband of Swallow was alive and doing well; the Heer Jan Botmar was not wounded at all, and as for the Vrouw Botmar, never in her life did she drink anything stronger than coffee, for the white man's firewater is poison to her.

Get you gone, you silly half-breed, who seek to deceive the ears of Sihamba, and I counsel you, hold fast to your business of theft and murder and give up that of lying, in which you will never succeed.

Now be off, you stink-cat of the rocks, lest I send some to hunt you from your hole who this time will use the points and not the shafts of their assegais.

Come, Swallow, let us be going." So they went, keeping under cover all the way to the camp, which, indeed, was quite close to them, and if Swart Piet made any answer they did not hear it.