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Very soon, if you come on, one of us must be dead, and it will be you, Nahoon, for I am armed and as you know I can shoot straight. What do you say?" Nahoon made no answer, but stood still at the edge of the glade, his wild and glowering eyes fixed on the white man's face and his breath coming in short gasps. "Will you let me go, if I let you go?" Hadden asked once more.
I often picture the rounded sandhills stretching from the Gonubie Mouth to the Nahoon, with the dark, olive-green boskage that clothed their curves with beauty, and the veil of orange tinted mystery that at dawn hung like a curtain across that region where sea and sky awaited, breathless, the advent of day.
"Wow!" broke in the chief Maputa, "this pretty one speaks truth, for the white man would have made a bargain with me under which Umgona, the wizard, and Nahoon, the soldier, were to be killed at the Crocodile Drift, and he himself suffered to escape with the girl. I spoke him softly and said 'yes, and then like a loyal man I reported to the king." "You hear," sighed Nanea.
Ay! and I myself with fly with you, for I too believe that there must be war, and then a white man in this country will be as a lamb among the eagles." "If Nahoon will come, I will go, Inkoos, but I cannot fly without Nahoon; it is better I should stay here and kill myself." "Surely then being so fair and loving him so well, you can teach him to forget his folly and to escape with you.
Cetywayo frowned. "What do you here away from your regiment, Nahoon?" "May it please the king, I have leave of absence from the head captains, and I come to ask a boon of the king's bounty." "Be swift, then, Nahoon."
"Weep not, Nanea," he said; "why do you tear my heart in two between my duty and my love? You know that I am a soldier, and that I must walk the path whereon the king has set my feet. Soon I think I shall be dead, for I seek death, and then it will matter nothing." "Nothing to you, Nahoon, who are at peace, but to me?
If Nahoon stood between him and the flower, so much the worse for Nahoon, and if it should wither in his grasp, so much the worse for the flower; it could always be thrown away. Thus it came about that, not for the first time in his life, Philip Hadden discarded the somewhat spasmodic prickings of conscience and listened to that evil whispering at his ear.
I am the wife of Nahoon I belong to Nahoon; therefore, I cannot look on any other man while Nahoon lives. It is not our custom, Inkoos, for we are not as the white women, but ignorant and simple, and when we vow ourselves to a man, we abide by that vow till death." "Indeed," said Hadden; "and so now you go to tell Nahoon that I have offered to make you my wife."
Cetywayo listened to his talk in silence, and when he had done answered by reminding him tersely that if Nanea did not appear at the date named, both she and he, her father, would in due course certainly decorate a cross-road in their own immediate neighbourhood. The captain, Nahoon, afforded a more curious study.
"Ay," he answered, "betrothed to the king." "No, betrothed to Nahoon." "But it is the king who will take you within a week; is it not so? And would you not rather that I should take you than the king?" "It seems to be so, Inkoos, and I would rather go with you than with the king, but most of all I desire to marry Nahoon.
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