"Oh, Macumazahn, you will live without doubt, and be none the worse. Two
of our doctors--very clever men--have looked at you and said so. One of
them tied you up in all those skins, and I promised him a heifer for the
business, if he cured you, and gave him a goat on account. But you must
lie here for a month or more, so he says. Meanwhile Panda has sent for
the hides which he demanded of me to be made into shields, and I have
been obliged to kill twenty-five of my beasts to provide them--that is,
of my own and of those of my headmen."
"Then I wish you and your headmen had killed them before we met those
buffalo, Umbezi," I groaned, for my ribs were paining me very much.
"Send Saduko and Sikauli here; I would thank them for saving my life."
So they came, next morning, I think, and I thanked them warmly enough.
"There, there, Baas," said Scowl, who was literally weeping tears of joy
at my return from delirium and coma to the light of life and reason; not
tears of Mameena's sort, but real ones, for I saw them running down his
snub nose, that still bore marks of the eagle's claws. "There, there,
say no more, I beseech you. If you were going to die, I wished to die,
too, who, if you had left it, should only have wandered through the
world without a heart. That is why I jumped into the pool, not because I
am brave."
When I heard this my own eyes grew moist. Oh, it is the fashion to abuse
natives, but from whom do we meet with more fidelity and love than from
these poor wild Kafirs that so many of us talk of as black dirt which
chances to be fashioned to the shape of man?
"As for myself, Inkoosi," added Saduko, "I only did my duty. How could
I have held up my head again if the bull had killed you while I walked
away alive? Why, the very girls would have mocked at me. But, oh, his
skin was tough. I thought that assegai would never get through it."
Observe the difference between these two men's characters. The one,
although no hero in daily life, imperils himself from sheer, dog-like
fidelity to a master who had given him many hard words and sometimes
a flogging in punishment for drunkenness, and the other to gratify his
pride, also perhaps because my death would have interfered with his
plans and ambitions in which I had a part to play. No, that is a hard
saying; still, there is no doubt that Saduko always first took his own
interests into consideration, and how what he did would reflect upon
his prospects and repute, or influence the attainment of his desires. I
think this was so even when Mameena was concerned--at any rate, in the
beginning--although certainly he always loved her with a single-hearted
passion that is very rare among Zulus.