devil and would call no man master. He took to big-game
hunting, which was what God intended him for, for he could track
a tsessebe in thick bush, and was far the finest shot I have seen in
my life. He took parties to the Pungwe flats, and Barotseland, and
up to Tanganyika. Then he made a speciality of the Ngami region,
where I once hunted with him, and he was with me when I went
prospecting in Damaraland.

When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great
hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work
in the North Transvaal. Beyers would have hanged him if he could
have caught him, and there was no love lost between Peter and his
own people for many a day. When it was all over and things had
calmed down a bit, he settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me
when I went on trek. At the time when I left Africa two years
before, I had lost sight of him for months, and heard that he was
somewhere on the Congo poaching elephants. He had always a great idea
of making things hum so loud in Angola that the Union Government
would have to step in and annex it. After Rhodes Peter had the
biggest notions south of the Line.

He was a man of about five foot ten, very thin and active, and as
strong as a buffalo. He had pale blue eyes, a face as gentle as a
girl's, and a soft sleepy voice. From his present appearance it
looked as if he had been living hard lately. His clothes were of the
cut you might expect to get at Lobito Bay, he was as lean as a rake,
deeply browned with the sun, and there was a lot of grey in his
beard. He was fifty-six years old, and used to be taken for forty.
Now he looked about his age.