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She wrung her hands in despair. "Oh, I know that look of you!" she cried. "You see only down your narrow lane!" That evening Kingozi called to him Cazi Moto, Simba, and Mali-ya-bwana. He commanded them to build a little fire, and when the light from the leaping flames had penetrated his dull vision, he told them to sit down before him. Thus they knew that a serious council was intended.
"Many of these people are shenzis," Mali-ya-bwana pursued his own thought. "That is true," Kingozi acknowledged. "If this is a sportsman, from what part did he hail to have got together this lot! We will see." As the swinging hammock came opposite his concealment, Kingozi stepped forward.
Certainly Winkleman had not yet arrived, and he was long overdue. On the other hand, neither had Simba nor Mali-ya-bwana reported; and they were equally overdue. These were ticklish times; and Kingozi had great difficulty in sitting calmly in his canvas chair listening to the endless inconsequences of a savage. The Leopard Woman could not understand how he did it.
He assisted the Leopard Woman to this improvised couch and laid her upon it. She seemed to drop instantly asleep. They brought more grass and piled it in another place. Mali-ya-bwana superintended these activities zealously. He had drunk his fill, had bolted a chunk of goat's flesh one of the savages had handed him, now he was ready to fulfil his bwana's commands. "You will eat?" he asked.
"M'buzi!" grunted Kingozi, applying to the stranger the superlative of Swahili contempt. He did not know he spoke aloud; for it is not well for one white man to criticise another to a native. But Mali-ya-bwana replied. "Bibi," he corrected. Kingozi stared. "By Jove, you're right!" he exclaimed in English. "It is a woman!" He burst into an unexpected laugh.
They now had both food and water, and would camp somewhere out on the plain. "I will sleep," he decided. Mali-ya-bwana at once thrust the savages outside, without ceremony, peremptorily. When the bwana of an African belonging to the safari class wants anything, the latter gets it for him.
Before him squatted on their heels in the posture white men find so trying Mali-ya-bwana and Simba, entirely respectful, their shining black eyes fixed on the white man. The open ends of the banda gave out on a dry boulder-strewn wash and the parched side of a hill. All else was sky.
"Nevertheless," said Mali-ya-bwana, who as co-leader was privileged to more open speech, "potio and meat are better than meat only." Simba looked at him inquiringly. "You have a thought?" Mali-ya-bwana leaned forward. "It is this: If the bone has such great magic that thus we can take prisoner a mighty bwana like this, surely it is powerful enough to fight also against safari men."
The headman of the author of these lines went single handed and stopped in its very inception a royal n'goma, or dance, to which men had come a day's journey, merely because his bwana wanted to sleep! Kingozi was here alone, in a strange country, for the moment helpless; but Mali-ya-bwana hustled the tribesmen out as brusquely as though a regiment were at his back.
Let order be given to search him out." "That shall be done," said M'tela after a moment's thought. Mali-ya-bwana and Simba set out with a posse of M'tela's men. They had no great difficulty in getting track of the missing Bavarian. Winkleman had arrived to find the camping site deserted. He had, indomitably, set out on the track of his safari.
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