easy to deal with, since it stood three hundred yards from the
nearest water, and the water was placed out of bounds.

"It must have been about the third day after the quarantine was
declared that the, the incident occurred. A man and a girl, carrying
empty waterpots, had come out of the village towards the stream. The
armed outposts, with their big stabbing assegais ready in their
hands, ordered them back, but the poor creatures were crazed with
thirst and desperate. They were pleading and crying and still
creeping forward, the man first, the girl a few steps behind, mad for
just water. What happened first was in the regular order of things in
those parts. The fellows on guard simply waited, and when the man was
up to them one stepped forward and drove the thirty-inch blade of a
stabbing assegai clean through him. Then they stood ready to do the
same to the girl as soon as she arrived.

"She had tumbled to her knees at the sight of the killing, and was
still crying and begging piteously for water. They said she held out
her arms to them, and bowed her head between. After a while, when
they did not answer, she got to her feet and stood looking at the
dead body stretched in the sun, the long blades of the spears, and
the shining of the water beyond. It was as though she was making up
her mind about them, for at last she picked up her waterpot and came
forward towards her sure and swift death. The assegai-men were so
intent on her that none of them seem to have heard a man who came out
of the bush close behind them. One of them, as I was told, had
actually flung back his arm for the thrust and the girl, she hadn't
even flinched! The thing was within an inch of being done; the
stabbing assegai goes like lightning, you know; she must have been
tasting the very bitterness of death. The man from the bush was not a
second too soon. The first they knew of him was a roar, and he had
the shaft of the assegai in his hand and had plucked it from its
owner.

"He must have moved like a young earthquake, and bellowed like a
full-grown thunderstorm. All my informants laid stress on his voice;
he exploded in their midst with an uproar that overthrew their
senses, and whacked right and left with fist and foot and assegai. He
was a white man; it took them some seconds to see that through the
dirt on him; he was clad in rags of cloth, and his head was bare, and
he raged like a sackful of tiger-cats. He really must have been
something e