und myself in a rather
remote part of the Umvoti district of Natal, some miles to the east of a
mountain called the Eland's Kopje, whither I had gone to carry out a
big deal in mealies, over which, by the way, I lost a good bit of money.
That has always been my fate when I plunged into commercial ventures.

One night my wagons, which were overloaded with these confounded
weevilly mealies, got stuck in the drift of a small tributary of the
Tugela that most inopportunely had come down in flood. Just as darkness
fell I managed to get them up the bank in the midst of a pelting rain
that soaked me to the bone. There seemed to be no prospect of lighting
a fire or of obtaining any decent food, so I was about to go to bed
supperless when a flash of lightning showed me a large kraal situated
upon a hillside about half a mile away, and an idea entered my mind.

"Who is the headman of that kraal?" I asked of one of the Kafirs who had
collected round us in our trouble, as such idle fellows always do.

"Tshoza, Inkoosi," answered the man.

"Tshoza! Tshoza!" I said, for the name seemed familiar to me. "Who is
Tshoza?"

"Ikona [I don't know], Inkoosi. He came from Zululand some years ago
with Saduko the Mad."

Then, of course, I remembered at once, and my mind flew back to the
night when old Tshoza, the brother of Matiwane, Saduko's father, had cut
out the cattle of the Bangu and we had fought the battle in the pass.

"Oh!" I said, "is it so? Then lead me to Tshoza, and I will give you
a 'Scotchman.'" (That is, a two-shilling piece, so called because some
enterprising emigrant from Scotland passed off a vast number of them
among the simple natives of Natal as substitutes for half-crowns.)

Tempted by this liberal offer--and it was very liberal, because I was
anxious to get to Tshoza's kraal before its inhabitants went to bed--the
meditative Kafir consented to guide me by a dark and devious path that
ran through bush and dripping fields of corn. At length we arrived--for
if the kraal was only half a mile away, the path to it covered fully two
miles--and glad enough was I when we had waded the last stream and found
ourselves at its gate.

In response to the usual inquiries, conducted amid a chorus of yapping
dogs, I was informed that Tshoza did not live there, but somewhere else;
that he was too old to see anyone; that he had gone to sleep and could
not be disturbed; that he was dead and had been buried last week, and so
forth