This reply seemed to amuse him.  At any rate, with one of those almost infantile changes of mood which are common to savages of every degree, he passed from wrath to laughter.

“You are quick as a lizard,” he said.  “Why should I, who have so many wives, want one more, who would certainly hate me?  Just because she is white, and would make the others, who are black, jealous, I suppose.  Indeed, they would poison her, or pinch her to death in a month, and then come to tell me she had died of fretting.  Also, you are right; you have my safe conduct, and must go hence unharmed this time.  But look you, little lizard, although you escape me between the stones, I will pull off your tail.  I have said that I want to pluck this tall white flower of yours, and I will pluck her.  I know where she dwells.  Yes, just where the wagon she sleeps in stands in the line, for my spies have told me, and I will give orders that whoever is killed, she is to be spared and brought to me living.  So perhaps you will meet this wife of yours here, Macumazahn.”

Now, at these ominous words, that might mean so much or so little, the sweat started to my brow, and a shiver went down my back.

“Perhaps I shall and perhaps I shall not, O king,” I answered.  “The world is as full of chances to-day as it was not long ago when I shot at the sacred vultures on Hloma Amabutu.  Still, I think that my wife will never be yours, O king.”

“Ow!” said Dingaan; “this little white ant is making another tunnel, thinking that he will come up at my back.  But what if I put down my heel and crush you, little white ant?  Do you know,” he added confidentially, “that the Boer who mends my guns and whom here we call ‘Two-faces,’ because he looks towards you Whites with one eye and towards us Blacks with the other, is still very anxious that I should kill you?  Indeed, when I told him that my spies said that you were to ride with the Boers, as I had requested that you should be their Tongue, he answered that unless I promised to give you to the vultures, he would warn them against coming.  So, since I wanted them to come as I had arranged with him, I promised.”

“Is it so, O king?” I asked.  “And pray why does this Two-faces, whom we name Pereira, desire that I should be killed?”

“Ow!” chuckled the obese old ruffian; “cannot you with all your cleverness guess that, O Macumazahn?  Perhaps it is he who needs the tall white maiden, and not I. Perhaps if he does certain things for me, I have promised her to him in payment.  And perhaps,” he added, laughing quite loud, “I shall trick him after all, keeping her for myself, and paying him in another way, for can a cheat grumble if he is out-cheated?”

I answered that I was an honest man, and knew nothing about cheats, or at what they could or could not grumble.