"Not much, Baas," he answered, "except that we are alive, who should be
dead. The Maam and the Missie are still asleep in that tent, or at least
the Maam is, for the Missie is helping Dogeetah, her father, to nurse
Baas Stephen, who has an ugly wound. The Pongos have gone and I think
will not return, for they have had enough of the white man's guns. The
Mazitu have buried those of their dead whom they could recover, and have
sent their wounded, of whom there were only six, back to Beza Town on
litters. That is all, Baas."

Then while I washed, and never did I need a bath more, and put on my
underclothes, in which I had swum on the night of the killing of the
Motombo, that Hans had wrung out and dried in the sun, I asked that
worthy how he was after his adventures.

"Oh! well enough, Baas," he answered, "now that my stomach is full,
except that my hands and wrists are sore with crawling along the ground
like a babyan (baboon), and that I cannot get the stink of that god's
skin out of my nose. Oh! you don't know what it was: if I had been a
white man it would have killed me. But, Baas, perhaps you did well to
take drunken old Hans with you on this journey after all, for I was
clever about the little gun, wasn't I? Also about your swimming of the
Crocodile Water, though it is true that the sign of the spider and the
moth which your reverend father sent, taught me that. And now we have
got back safe, except for the Mazitu, Jerry, who doesn't matter,
for there are plenty more like him, and the wound in Baas Stephen's
shoulder, and that heavy flower which he thought better than brandy."

"Yes, Hans," I said, "I did well to take you and you are clever, for had
it not been for you, we should now be cooked and eaten in Pongo-land. I
thank you for your help, old friend. But, Hans, another time please sew
up the holes in your waistcoat pocket. Four caps wasn't much, Hans."

"No, Baas, but it was enough; as they were all good ones. If there had
been forty you could not have done much more. Oh! your reverend father
knew all that" (my departed parent had become a kind of patron saint to
Hans) "and did not wish this poor old Hottentot to have more to carry
than was needed. He knew you wouldn't miss, Baas, and that there were
only one god, one devil, and one man waiting to be killed."

I laughed, for Hans's way of putting things was certainly original, and
having got on my coat, went to see Stephen. At the door of the tent I
met B