“Yes, this,” I answered, “that although you do not know it, it is an unjust sentence, built up on the lies of one who has always been my enemy, and of a man whose brain is rotten.  I never betrayed the Boers.  If anyone betrayed them it was Hernan Pereira himself, who, as I proved to the General Retief, had been praying Dingaan to kill me, and whom Retief threatened to put upon his trial for this very crime, for which reason and no other Pereira fled from the kraal, taking his tool Henri Marais with him.  You have asked God to judge me.  Well, I ask God to judge him and Henri Marais also, and I know He will in one way or another.  As for me, I am ready to die, as I have been for months while serving the cause of you Boers.  Shoot me now if you will, and make an end.  But I tell you that if I escape your hands I will not suffer this treatment to go unpunished.  I will lay my case before the rulers of my people, and if necessary before my Queen, yes, if I have to travel to London to do it, and you Boers shall learn that you cannot condemn an innocent Englishman upon false testimony and not pay the price.  I tell you that price shall be great if I live, and if I die it shall be greater still.”

Now these words, very foolish words, I admit, which being young and inexperienced I spoke in my British pride, I could see made a great impression upon my judges.  They believed, to be fair to them, that they had passed a just sentence.  Blinded by prejudice and falsehood, and maddened by the dreadful losses their people had suffered during the past few days at the hands of a devilish savage, they believed that I was the instigator of those losses, one who ought to die.  Indeed, all, or nearly all the Boers were persuaded that Dingaan was urged to this massacre by the counsels of Englishmen.  The mere fact of my own and my servant’s miraculous escape, when all my companions had perished, proved my guilt to them without the evidence of Pereira, which, being no lawyers, they thought sufficient to justify their verdict.

Still, they had an uneasy suspicion that this evidence was not conclusive, and might indeed be rejected in toto by a more competent court upon various grounds.  Also they knew themselves to be rebels who had no legal right to form a court, and feared the power of the long arm of England, from which for a little while they had escaped.  If I were allowed to tell my tale to the Parliament in London, what might not happen to them, they wondered—­to them who had ventured to pass sentence of death upon a subject of the Queen of Great Britain?  Might not this turn the scale against them?  Might not Britain arise in wrath and crush them, these men who dared to invoke her forms of law in order to kill her citizen?  Those, as I learned afterwards, were the thoughts that passed through their minds.

Also another thought passed through their minds—­that if the sentence were executed at once, a dead man cannot appeal, and that here I had no friends to take up my cause and avenge me.  But of all this they said nothing.  Only at a sign I was marched away to my little house and imprisoned under guard.