At length, on the 23d, it became evident that Stoffel must return and seek advice from Mr. Thomson, the missionary, who had some skill in surgery. This change of plan involved a corresponding change in all the arrangements of the journey, and such of Frank Oates’s goods as had hitherto been carried in the trader’s waggon had now to be taken in his own, already sufficiently loaded when they left the settlement. On the 24th Stoffel took his departure southwards, and two days later Frank Oates went on alone towards the Zambesi. It was a lovely moonlight night when he resumed the journey, the waggon running heavy through thick mopani veldt. The prospect of success in his present enterprise now seemed nearing its fulfilment, yet in reality he was but on the eve of a fresh misfortune. “We passed a kraal,” he writes in his Journal, “on the left side of the road, perhaps two miles from where we started, and had gone perhaps one mile more, when, in crossing a small ‘sloot,’[50] one of the wheels gave way and came down, broken to pieces. So much,” he concludes, “for the new waggon, and for my hopes and expectations!” The day after this catastrophe, which appeared in its results fatal to all hope of his reaching the Zambesi that season, late as it had now become, he arranged to send his driver--a Kafir named Klaas, whom he had engaged from a Mr. Horn upon the Ramaqueban--and three boys, with the broken wheel to Tati, and also with a note to Mr. Brown, asking for assistance. The annoyances he suffered, during their absence of about a fortnight, from the natives of the neighbouring kraals are described at length in some of his letters, largely quoted from below. It is therefore sufficient here to say that he was wilfully subjected by them to every possible inconvenience, was in constant peril of being robbed, and at one time even appeared to be in some danger of his life. The whole of this time he could not leave his waggon, lest he should return to find it plundered, and even his own boys were not all to be depended on. At last, on the 8th of September, the needful help arrived, and he was released from his state of bondage. He had just had a most threatening visit from a noisy crowd of natives, when the messengers he had sent returned from Tati with all that he had asked for. After relating in his Journal the incidents of this unpleasant interview, he thus concludes the story:--