Presently Hokosa spoke in a thick voice:—­

“Messenger,” he said, “this cross that you have given me to bear is heavy indeed.”

“Yes, Hokosa,” answered Owen, “for to it your sins are nailed.”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PASSING OF OWEN

Once she was outside of Owen’s house, Noma did not tarry.  First she returned to Hokosa’s kraal, where she had already learnt from his head wife, Zinti, and others the news of his betrayal of the plot of Hafela, of his conversion to the faith of the Christians, and of the march of the impi to ambush the prince.  Here she took a little spear, and rolling up in a skin blanket as much dried meat as she could carry, she slipped unnoticed from the kraal.  Her object was to escape from the Great Place, but this she did not try to do by any of the gates, knowing them to be guarded.  Some months ago, before she started on her embassy, she had noted a weak spot in the fence, where dogs had torn a hole through which they passed out to hunt at night.  To this spot she made her way under cover of the darkness—­for though she still greatly feared to be alone at night, her pressing need conquered her fears—­and found that the hole was yet there, for a tall weed growing in its mouth had caused it to be overlooked by those whose duty it was to mend the fence.  With her assegai she widened it a little, then drew her lithe shape through it, and lying hidden till the guard had passed, climbed the two stone walls beyond.  Once she was free of the town, she set her course by the stars and started forward at a steady run.

“If my strength holds I shall yet be in time to warn him,” she muttered to herself.  “Ah! friend Hokosa, this new madness of yours has blunted your wits that once were sharp enough.  You have set me free, and now you shall learn how I can use my freedom.  Not for nothing have I been your pupil, Hokosa the fox.”

Before the dawn broke Noma was thirty miles from the Great Place, and before the next dawn she was a hundred.  At sunset on that second day she stood among mountains.  To her right stretched a great defile, a rugged place of rocks and bush, wherein she knew that the regiments of the king were hid in ambush.  Perchance she was too late, perchance the impi of Hafela had already passed to its doom in yonder gorge.  Swiftly she ran forward on to the trail which led to the gorge, to find that it had been trodden by many feet and recently.  Moving to and fro she searched the spoor with her eyes, then rose with a sigh of joy.  It was old, and marked the passage of the great company of women and children and their thousands of cattle which, in execution of the plot, had travelled this path some days before.  Either the impi had not yet arrived, or it had gone by some other road.  Weary as she was, Noma followed the old spoor backwards.  A mile or more away it crossed the crest of a hog-backed mountain, from whose summit she searched the plain beyond, and not in vain, for there far beneath her twinkled the watch-fires of the army of Hafela.