The warriors stared and murmured, for by those words, wittingly or unwittingly, their general had confessed his faith, and that day they made ribald songs about him in the camp.  But on the morrow when they learned how that the man whom the prince spared had been seized by a lion and taken away as he sat at night with his companions in the bivouac, his mouth full of boasting of his own courage in offering insult to the prince and the new faith, then they looked at each other askance and said little more of the matter.  Doubtless it was chance, and yet this Spirit Whom the Messenger preached was one of Whom it seemed wisest not to speak lightly.

But still the trouble grew, for by now the witch-doctors, with Hokosa at the head of them, were frightened for their place and power, and fomented it both openly and in secret.  Of the women they asked what would become of them when men were allowed to take but one wife?  Of the heads of kraals, how they would grow wealthy when their daughters ceased to be worth cattle?  Of the councillors and generals, how the land could be protected from its foes when they were commanded to lay down the spear?  Of the soldiers, whose only trade was war, how it would please them to till the fields like girls?  Dismay took hold of the nation, and although they were much loved, there was open talk of killing or driving away the king and Nodwengo who favoured the white man, and of setting up Hafela in their place.

At length the crisis came, and in this fashion.  The Amasuka, like many other African tribes, had a strange veneration for certain varieties of snakes which they declared to be possessed by the spirits of their ancestors.  It was a law among them that if one of these snakes entered a kraal it must not be killed, or even driven away, under pain of death, but must be allowed to share with the human occupants any hut that it might select.  As a result of this enforced hospitality deaths from snake-bite were numerous among the people; but when they happened in a kraal its owners met with little sympathy, for the doctors explained that the real cause of them was the anger of some ancestral spirit towards his descendants.  Now, before John was despatched to instruct Owen in the language of the Amasuka a certain girl was sealed to him as his future wife, and this girl, who during his absence had been orphaned, he had married recently with the approval of Owen, who at this time was preparing her for baptism.  On the third morning after his marriage John appeared before his master in the last extremity of grief and terror.

“Help me, Messenger!” he cried, “for my ancestral spirit has entered our hut and bitten my wife as she lay asleep.”

“Are you mad?” asked Owen.  “What is an ancestral spirit, and how can it have bitten your wife?”

“A snake,” gasped John, “a green snake of the worst sort.”

Then Owen remembered the superstition, and snatching blue-stone and spirits of wine from his medicine chest, he rushed to John’s hut.  As it happened, he was fortunately in time with his remedies and succeeded in saving the woman’s life, whereby his reputation as a doctor and a magician, already great, was considerably enlarged.