"Oh, yes, Inkoosi," she answered, "that is my poor name. But how did you
hear it, and how do you know me?"
"I heard it from one Saduko"--here she frowned a little--"and others,
and I knew you because you are so beautiful"--an incautious speech at
which she broke into a dazzling smile and tossed her deer-like head.
"Am I?" she asked. "I never knew it, who am only a common Zulu girl to
whom it pleases the great white chief to say kind things, for which I
thank him"; and she made a graceful little reverence, just bending
one knee. "But," she went on quickly, "whatever else I be, I am of no
knowledge, not fit to tend you who are hurt. Shall I go and send my
oldest mother?"
"Do you mean her whom your father calls the 'Worn-out-old-Cow,' and
whose ear he shot off?"
"Yes, it must be she from the description," she answered with a little
shake of laughter, "though I never heard him give her that name."
"Or if you did, you have forgotten it," I said dryly. "Well, I think
not, thank you. Why trouble her, when you will do quite as well? If
there is milk in that gourd, perhaps you will give me a drink of it."
She flew to the bowl like a swallow, and next moment was kneeling at my
side and holding it to my lips with one hand, while with the other she
supported my head.
"I am honoured," she said. "I only came to the hut the moment before
you woke, and seeing you still lost in swoon, I wept--look, my eyes are
still wet [they were, though how she made them so I do not know]--for I
feared lest that sleep should be but the beginning of the last."
"Quite so," I said; "it is very good of you. And now, since your fears
are groundless--thanks be to the heavens--sit down, if you will, and
tell me the story of how I came here."
She sat down, not, I noted, as a Kafir woman ordinarily does, in a kind
of kneeling position, but on a stool.
"You were carried into the kraal, Inkoosi," she said, "on a litter of
boughs. My heart stood still when I saw that litter coming; it was no
more heart; it was cold iron, because I thought the dead or injured man
was--" And she paused.
"Saduko?" I suggested.
"Not at all, Inkoosi--my father."
"Well, it wasn't either of them," I said, "so you must have felt happy."
"Happy! Inkoosi, when the guest of our house had been wounded, perhaps
to death--the guest of whom I have heard so much, although by misfortune
I was absent when he arrived."
"A difference of opinion with your eldest mother?" I suggested.