ght to you, Watcher-by-Night
with the white heart and the strange destiny, good night to you, and try
not to think too hardly of the old Kafir cheat who just now is called
'Opener-of-Roads.' My servant waits without to lead you to your hut,
and if you wish to be back at Umbezi's kraal by nightfall to-morrow,
you will do well to start ere sunrise, since, as you found in coming,
Saduko, although he may be a fool, is a very good walker, and you do not
like to be left behind, Macumazahn, do you?"

So I rose to go, but as I went some impulse seemed to take him and he
called me back and made me sit down again.

"Macumazahn," he said, "I would add a word. When you were quite a lad
you came into this country with Retief, did you not?"

"Yes," I answered slowly, for this matter of the massacre of Retief is
one of which I have seldom cared to speak, for sundry reasons, although
I have made a record of it in writing.[*] Even my friends Sir Henry
Curtis and Captain Good have heard little of the part I played in that
tragedy. "But what do you know of that business, Zikali?"

[*--Published under the title of "Marie."--EDITOR.]

"All that there is to know, I think, Macumazahn, seeing that I was at
the bottom of it, and that Dingaan killed those Boers on my advice--just
as he killed Chaka and Umhlangana."

"You cold-blooded old murderer--" I began, but he interrupted me at
once.

"Why do you throw evil names at me, Macumazahn, as I threw the stone of
your fate at you just now? Why am I a murderer because I brought about
the death of some white men that chanced to be your friends, who had
come here to cheat us black folk of our country?"

"Was it for _this_ reason that you brought about their deaths, Zikali?"
I asked, staring him in the face, for I felt that he was lying to me.

"Not altogether, Macumazahn," he answered, letting his eyes, those
strange eyes that could look at the sun without blinking, fall before
my gaze. "Have I not told you that I hate the House of Senzangakona?
And when Retief and his companions were killed, did not the spilling of
their blood mean war to the end between the Zulus and the White Men? Did
it not mean the death of Dingaan and of thousands of his people, which
is but a beginning of deaths? Now do you understand?"

"I understand that you are a very wicked man," I answered with
indignation.

"At least _you_ should not say so, Macumazahn," he replied in a new
voice, one with the ring of tr