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"Of course, I've been plundered, swindled, all along the line, ever since I can remember. I'm tired of that d d respectability, Hazon. It doesn't pay. It never has paid. This, however, does." The other smiled significantly at the word. "Respectability yes," he said.
Yet the man had awakened in him a strange interest, a curiosity that was almost acute; but beyond the fact that his name was Hazon, and the darkly veiled hints on the part of those who alluded to the subject, that he was a ruffian of the deepest dye, Laurence could learn nothing about him. He noted, however, that if the man seemed disliked, he seemed about equally feared.
"Anything for a little excitement!" he had said. In very truth his aspiration was realized. There was excitement enough in the brandished spears and blazing eyeballs, in the infuriated demoniacal faces, in the deafening, roaring clamour. "This is no matter for you," cried Hazon in firm, ringing tones. "Take us to the king. We can explain. The affair was an accident."
I don't mind telling you, Hazon, that life, so far as I am concerned, was no great thing before." "I guessed as much," assented the other, with a nod of the head. "Quite. Now, I'm broke, stony broke, and it's more than ever a case of stealing away to hang one's self in a well. I tell you squarely, I'd walk into the jaws of the devil himself to effect the capture of the oof-bird." "Yes?
Shields are flung high in the air, and dark bodies, leaping, fall forward upon their faces, to be trampled into lifelessness as their own comrades tread them down, not pausing, rushing over them as they lie. "No, no! no quicker," reproves Hazon, who is directing here, where the assailant's force is the strongest, namely, the main body, the isifuba or breast of the impi.
"So so," was the reply, as Hazon, who had been biding the evaporation of his younger friend's effusiveness, now came forward. But his handshake was characteristic of the man, for it was as though they had parted only last week, and that but temporarily. "And is it really you yourself, old chap?" rattled on Holmes. "It's for all the world as if you had risen from the dead.
To his inquiries on that head he obtained scant and uncordial response. Hazon was ill, some believed, while others charitably opined that he was "on the booze." Whatever it was no one cared, and strongly recommended Laurence to do likewise.
They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep and cattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why not in these, who were even lower than the higher animals? This theory of their sinister occupation Hazon thoroughly indorsed. "Depend upon it, Stanninghame," he said, "ours is the right view to take of it the only view.
This was the somewhat uncomplimentary nick-name by which Holmes was known, bestowed upon him on account of his talkative tendencies as contrasted with the laconic sententiousness of Hazon. "I rule, therefore," went on the king, "that Nomtyeketye be taken hence to where atonement is offered. The other may depart from among us to his own land."
Laurence, seated there, narrowly watching his old comrades, was swift to notice that whereas these months of captivity and suspense had left Hazon the same cool, saturnine, philosophical being he had first known him, upon Holmes they had had quite a different effect.
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