etwas will go after the oxen presently," he answered, "and we
have seen enough of them."

"Quite enough," I answered, with enthusiasm; "I never want to see
another; but where are we to go? Here we are alone with one gun and a
little girl in the vast and lonely veldt. Which way shall we turn?"

"Our faces were towards the north before we met the Zulus," answered
Indaba-zimbi; "let us still keep them to the north. Ride on, Macumazahn;
to-night when we off-saddle I will look into the matter."

So all that long afternoon we rode on, following the course of the
river. From the nature of the ground we could only go slowly, but before
sunset I had the satisfaction of knowing that there must be at least
twenty-five miles between us and those accursed Zulus. Little Tota slept
most of the way, the motion of the horse was easy, and she was worn out.

At last the sunset came, and we off-saddled in a dell by the river.
There was not much to eat, but I soaked some biscuit in water for Tota,
and Indaba-zimbi and I made a scanty meal of biltong. When we had done I
took off Tota's frock, wrapped her up in a blanket near the fire we had
made, and lit a pipe. I sat there by the side of the sleeping orphaned
child, and from my heart thanked Providence for saving her life and mine
from the slaughter of that day. What a horrible experience it had been!
It seemed like a nightmare to look back upon. And yet it was sober fact,
one among those many tragedies which dotted the paths of the emigrant
Boers with the bones of men, women, and children. These horrors are
almost forgotten now; people living in Natal now, for instance, can
scarcely realize that some forty years ago six hundred white people,
many of them women and children, were thus massacred by the Impis of
Dingaan. But it was so, and the name of the district, _Weenen_, or the
Place of Weeping, will commemorate them for ever.

Then I fell to reflecting on the extraordinary adroitness old
Indaba-zimbi had shown in saving my life. It appeared that he himself
had lived among the Umtetwa Zulus in his earlier manhood, and was a
noted rain-doctor and witch-finder. But when T'Chaka, Dingaan's brother,
ordered a general massacre of the witch-finders, he alone had saved his
life by his skill in magic, and ultimately fled south for reasons too
long to set out here. When he heard, therefore, that the regiment was
an Umtetwa regiment, which, leaving their wives and children, had broken
away from