mo, who paid tribute to M'Kombi, and was sort of protected
and supported by him. He was always slopping over his borders with a
handful of fighting men and burning and slaughtering and raping among
the peaceful kraals. A devil he was, a real black devil for cruelty
and lust. He had just started on a campaign when this lonely white
man arrived in the neighborhood, passing through a bit of district
with N'Komo's mark on it in the form of burned huts and bodies of
people. A man N'Komo had killed was a sight to make Beelzebub sick.
Torture, you know; mutilation beastliness! The white man must have
seen a good many such bodies.

"N'Komo and his swashbucklers had slept the night in a captured
kraal, and were still there in the morning when the white man
arrived. I know exactly the kind of scene it was. The carcasses of
the cattle slaughtered for meat would be lying all over the place
between the round huts, and bodies of men and women and children with
them. The place would be swarming with the tall, black spearmen, each
with a skin over his shoulder and about his loins; there would be a
fearful jabber, a clatter of voices and laughter and probably
screams, horrible screams, from some poor nigger whose death they'd
be dragging out, hour after hour, for their fun. Near the main gate
N'Komo was holding an indaba with his chief bucks. I've seen him many
times a great coal-black brute, six feet four in height, with the
flat, foolish, good-natured-looking face that fooled people into
thinking him a decent sort. I wish I'd shot him the first time I saw
him.

"Well, the indaba, the council, you know was in full swing when up
comes this white man, running as if for his life, and wailing,
wailing! The Kaffir who told me had seen it from where he was lying,
tied hand and foot, waiting his turn for the firebrands and the
knives. He said: 'He wailed like one who mourns for the dead!' There
was a burnt kraal not a mile away, so one can guess what he had been
seeing and was wailing about. 'His face,' the nigger told me, 'was
like the face of one who has lived through the torment of N'Komo and
is thirsty for death; a face to hide one's eyes before. And it was
white and shining like ivory!' He came thus, pelting blindly at a
run, into the midst of N'Komo's war indaba.

"He picked out N'Komo as the chief man there in a moment; that was
easy enough, and he broke into a torrent of words, gesticulating and
pointing back in the direction from