"Inkoosi," answered a deep voice, "I am Saduko."

"You are welcome," I answered, handing him a little gourd of snuff in
token of hospitality. Then I waited while he poured some of the snuff
into the palm of his hand and took it in the usual fashion.

"Inkoosi," he said, when he had scraped away the tears produced by the
snuff, "I have come to ask you a favour. You heard Umbezi say to-day
that he will not give me his daughter, Mameena, unless I give him a
hundred head of cows. Now, I have not got the cattle, and I cannot earn
them by work in many years. Therefore I must take them from a certain
tribe I know which is at war with the Zulus. But this I cannot do
unless I have a gun. If I had a good gun, Inkoosi--one that only goes
off when it is asked, and not of its own fancy, I who have some name
could persuade a number of men whom I know, who once were servants of my
father, or their sons, to be my companions in this venture."

"Do I understand that you wish me to give you one of my good guns with
two mouths to it (i.e. double-barrelled), a gun worth at least twelve
oxen, for nothing, O Saduko?" I asked in a cold and scandalised voice.

"Not so, O Watcher-by-Night," he answered; "not so, O
He-who-sleeps-with-one-eye-open" (another free and difficult rendering
of my native name, Macumazahn, or more correctly, Macumazana)--"I should
never dream of offering such an insult to your high-born intelligence."
He paused and took another pinch of snuff, then went on in a meditative
voice: "Where I propose to get those hundred cattle there are many more;
I am told not less than a thousand head in all. Now, Inkoosi," he
added, looking at me sideways, "suppose you gave me the gun I ask for,
and suppose you accompanied me with your own gun and your armed hunters,