said they were skooting up for Lo Magundi's country as fast as they could
go.

"And do you know," said Peter, striking his knee, and looking impressively
across the fire at the stranger; "what I'm as sure of as that I'm sitting
here? It's that that nigger I caught at my hut, that day, was her nigger
husband! He'd come to fetch her that time; and when she saw she couldn't
get away without our catching her, she got the cartridges for him!" Peter
paused impressively between the words. "And now she's gone back to him.
It's for him she's taken that ammunition!"

Peter looked across the fire at the stranger, to see what impression his
story was making.

"I tell you what," said Peter, "if I'd had any idea that day who that
bloody nigger was, the day I saw him standing at my door, I'd have given
him one cartridge in the back of his head more than ever he reckoned for!"
Peter looked triumphantly at the stranger. This was his only story; and he
had told it a score of times round the camp fire for the benefit of some
new-comer. When this point was reached, a low murmur of applause and
sympathy always ran round the group: tonight there was quiet; the
stranger's large dark eyes watched the fire almost as though he heard
nothing.

"I shouldn't have minded so much," said Peter after a while, "though no man
likes to have his woman taken away from him; but she was going to have a
kid in a month or two--and so was the little one for anything I know; she
looked like it! I expect they did away with it before it came; they've no
hearts, these niggers; they'd think nothing of doing that with a white
man's child. They've no hearts; they'd rather go back to a black man,