“‘Why!’ he said, ’this is not a baboon, it is a white child that the baboons have stolen and brought up!’

“Now, Mr. Allan, whether my father is right or wrong, you can judge for yourself.  You see Hendrika—­we named her that after Hendrik, who caught her—­she is a woman, not a monkey, and yet she has many of the ways of monkeys, and looks like one too.  You saw how she can climb, for instance, and you hear how she talks.  Also she is very savage, and when she is angry or jealous she seems to go mad, though she is as clever as anybody.  I think that she must have been stolen by the baboons when she was quite tiny and nurtured by them, and that is why she is so like them.

“But to go on.  My father said that it was our duty to keep Hendrika at any cost.  The worst of it was, that for three days she would eat nothing, and I thought that she would die, for all the while she sat and wailed.  On the third day, however, I went to the bars of the window place, and held out a cup of milk and some fruit to her.  She looked at it for a long while, then crept up moaning, took the milk from my hand, drank it greedily, and afterwards ate the fruit.  From that time forward she took food readily enough, but only if I would feed her.

“But I must tell you of the dreadful end of Hendrik.  From the day that we captured Hendrika the whole place began to swarm with baboons which were evidently employed in watching the kraals.  One day Hendrik went out towards the hills alone to gather some medicine.  He did not come back again, so the next day search was made.  By a big rock which I can show you, they found his scattered and broken bones, the fragments of his assegai, and four dead baboons.  They had set upon him and torn him to pieces.

“My father was very much frightened at this, but still he would not let Hendrika go, because he said that she was human, and that it was our duty to reclaim her.  And so we did—­to a certain extent, at least.  After the murder of Hendrik, the baboons vanished from the neighbourhood, and have only returned quite recently, so at length we ventured to let Hendrika out.  By this time she had grown very fond of me; still, on the first opportunity she ran away.  But in the evening she returned again.  She had been seeking the baboons, and could not find them.  Shortly afterwards she began to speak—­I taught her—­and from that time she has loved me so that she will not leave me.  I think it would kill her if I went away from her.  She watches me all day, and at night sleeps on the floor of my hut.  Once, too, she saved my life when I was swept down the river in flood; but she is jealous, and hates everybody else.  Look, how she is glaring at you now because I am talking to you!”

I looked.  Hendrika was tramping along with the child in her arms and staring at me in a most sinister fashion out of the corners of her eyes.

While I was reflecting on the Baboon-woman’s strange story, and thinking that she was an exceedingly awkward customer, the path took a sudden turn.