they passed Banana
Point at the river mouth, picked out other words in the tongue of
the river tribes.

The meaning of his speech, when they had made a mosaic of the
different understood facts, was this--that he was a great man in his
own land, but only a child now, being without arms or men, but that
if the white men ever came to his place, he would be a father and a
mother to them. He would throw his shield before them, and protect
them with bow and spear.

After this they sat together learning a polyglot speech that would
serve roughly as a medium of exchange.

And this was the story of the chief, slowly put together out of
these talks--

"I am Muata the chief. The kraal of my house is toward the setting
sun, but the fire no longer burns on the hearth. The men-robbers
fell upon the place in the early morning. The people were scattered
like goats before the lion. Many were taken by the men-robbers, and
many were slain; and among them my father.

"The chief's wife, my mother, fled with me into the Great Forest.
Many days she lived on roots, and the 'little people' found her in
her wanderings. They took her by crooked paths far from the land of
her people. Ohe!

"Through the dark woods--through the dark and terrible woods,
through the mist and the rain, with much pain, she followed them as
they went before her like shadows. And in the folds of her blanket
she bore me on her back. It is true.

"She was straight as the palm when she fled from the kraal, and when
after long journeying she set me down at the hiding-place, she was
thin and bent. Thin and bent was the chief's wife, she who had
maidens to wait on her.

"At the hiding-place in the forest there were people whose kraals
had been burnt by the men-robbers. Outcasts they were, of many
tribes, living together without a chief; but the place was fat, and
they grew fat, being without spirit.

"And Muata the child played with other children and grew. He grew on
the fatness of the land, and when he could walk, his playmates were
the young of the jackal; his playthings were the bow and the spear.

"Ohe! Muata grew to strength like the lion's cub in the knowledge of
the hunt. She, even his mother, taught him to follow the trail,
showed him the leaf bruised by the foot of a man traveling, showed
him the tracks of the beasts, taught him the cries of the animals.

"She rubbed the oil into his skin, set him to hurl the spear, to
shaft the arrow, to hit the ma