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Updated: June 11, 2025
Once, twice, it rang out. The loud ping of a rifle! Looking behind us, we saw eight or ten mounted Matabele! Stalwart warriors they were half naked, and riding stolen horses. They were coming our way! They had seen us! They were pursuing us! "Put on all speed!" I cried, in my agony. "Hilda, can you manage it?" She pedalled with a will. But, as we mounted the slope, I saw they were gaining upon us.
Once, I remember, when we fought the Matabele it was necessary to find out whether the chief Makapan was living. Some said he had died, others that he'd gone over the Portuguese border, but I believed he lived. No native could tell us, and since his kraal was well defended no runner could get through. So it was necessary to send a man. Peter lifted up his head and laughed.
By degrees, indeed, she came to believe that all this was gone from his mind, or that he had abandoned his advances as hopeless. A week passed since the Matabele attack, and nothing had happened.
"Perhaps not," the Molimo answered, rubbing his chin, "for in such matters even a Matabele generally keeps faith, and you may remember he promised you life for life. However, they are here ravening like lions round the walls, and that is why we carried you up to the top of the hill, that you might be safe from them." "But are you safe, my Father?"
I am not ashamed to say it, because very soon we may be separated for the last time. But I cannot talk now, I have come here to save my father." "Where is he, Benita?" "Dying in a cave up at the top of that fortress. I got down by a secret way. Are the Matabele still here?" "Very much so," he answered. "But something has happened.
Their ponies were tired, and they rode them full tilt with savage recklessness, making them canter up-hill, and so needlessly fatiguing them. The Matabele, indeed, are unused to horses, and manage them but ill. It is as foot soldiers, creeping stealthily through bush or long grass, that they are really formidable.
At some period during the fray, so say the Matabele, the white men began to 'sing. What is meant by the singing we can never know, but probably they cheered aloud after repelling a rash of the enemy. At length their fire grew faint and infrequent, till by degrees it flickered away, for men were lacking to handle the rifles.
He has always been that. As to this there was a moment of doubt, once. It was when he was out on his last pirating expedition in the Matabele country. The cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed, to visit a party of hostile chiefs. It was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near fetching another indiscretion out of the poet laureate.
"The niggers know too much; and where did they get their rifles? People at Rozenboom's believe some black-livered traitor has been stirring up the Matabele for weeks and weeks. An enemy of Rhodes's, of course, jealous of our advance; a French agent, perhaps; but more likely one of these confounded Transvaal Dutchmen. Depend upon it, it's Kruger's doing."
Well, you reached it, though but by the breadth of a blade of grass, and my children shot with the new rifles, and the place being narrow so that they could not miss, killed many of those hyenas of Amandabele. But to kill Matabele is like catching fleas on a dog's back: there are always more. Still it served its turn, you and your father were brought away safely, and we lost no one."
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