u could not carry, there was one basketful that
you knew nothing of. The women stayed there, for one was eighty, and one
near the time of her giving birth; and they dared not set out to follow
the remnant of their tribe because you were in the plains below. Every
day the old woman doled grain from the basket; and at night they cooked
it in their cave where you could not see their smoke; and every day
the old woman gave the young one two handfuls and kept one for herself,
saying, 'Because of the child within you.' And when the child was born
and the young woman strong, the old woman took a cloth and filled it
with all the grain that was in the basket; and she put the grain on
the young woman's head and tied the child on her back, and said, 'Go,
keeping always along the bank of the river, till you come north to the
land where our people are gone; and some day you can send and fetch me.'
And the young woman said, 'Have you corn in the basket to last till they
come?' And she said, 'I have enough.' And she sat at the broken door of
the cave and watched the young woman go down the hill and up the river
bank till she was hidden by the bush; and she looked down at the plain
below, and she saw the spot where the kraal had been and where she had
planted mealies when she was a young girl--"

"I met a woman with corn on her head and a child on her back!" said
Peter under his breath.

"--And tonight I saw her sit again at the door of the cave; and when the
sun had set she grew cold; and she crept in and lay down by the basket.
Tonight, at half-past three, she will die. I have known her since she
was a little child and played about the huts, while her mother worked in
the mealie fields. She was one of our company."

"Oh," said Peter.

"Other members we have here," said the stranger. "There was a
prospector"--he pointed north; "he was a man who drank and swore when it
listed him; but he had many servants, and they knew where to find him in
need. When they were ill, he tended them with his own hands; when they
were in trouble, they came to him for help. When this war began, and all
black men's hearts were bitter, because certain white men had lied
to them, and their envoys had been killed when they would have asked
England to put her hand out over them; at that time certain of the
men who fought the white men came to the prospector's hut. And the
prospector fired at them from a hole he had cut in his door; but they
fired back at hi