"Where on earth did you get that, Jack?" he whispered. "Is it tame?" "Blessed if I know. He simply crept up and peered at me through the monkey-ropes, and he hasn't said as much as a word yet." Paul, who had a tolerably wide acquaintance with the natives of the interior, surveyed the black wonderingly. He was a gigantic figure of a man, clothed only in a breech-clout, and armed with a wooden-pointed assegai. In appearance he was a cross between a full-blooded Zulu and a Kafir, but he seemed to possess all the immobility of an Indian chief. "A new breed," Paul announced, in a puzzled way. "All the other natives that I have tumbled across would have left their assegais as a sort of visiting-card before this. I'll try him with a bit of Seleke. He looks like them, to my mind, and I've heard yarns about their trekking into the interior to escape the persecution of the Zulus--don't blame 'em, either." Lowering his rifle, he turned to the black man, who had gravely squatted down upon the ground, with his bare hands upturned as a sign of peace. "Greeting, child of the Seleke," he said solemnly. "Have you any wish to lay before the white travelers who venture into your domains?" The native's face lighted visibly at sound of the Seleke tongue, and he made reply in the same language, although in a slightly different dialect. "Greeting, white men from the sun! You are welcome, and doubly welcome, to the realm of Moshesh, chief of the Dumalas. You are sent for a purpose, godsmen, and I am sent to pray you to break your march at the village of N'koto, not a noon's march from here." Both Paul and Jack surveyed him suspiciously. His friendliness was both unexpected and extraordinary to any one cognizant, as they were, with the customs of the African of the interior. True, they might have some surviving veneer of civilization, being an offshoot from the Selekes, but it was a very slender thread of safety to trust to. "We are sent for a purpose, are we?" Paul muttered. "For the purpose of being converted into black man's pork pie, I suppose. Jack, what on earth are we to do with this chap? He's getting on my nerves. I wish he'd move, and not look so much like a stuffed monkey." "Ask him what he wants," proposed the other. "If we kick him out, he'll be potting at us with that sardine-opener." Nodding, Paul turned to the native again. "What are you called, O child of the Seleke?" he asked, reverting to the man's own dialect. "I am called N'tshu Gontze," was the dignified response. "The dickens you are! Sounds like a kind of fish," interjected Jack, who would have joked in the face of a simoon. "Ask him what his grandfather's name is, Paul." "Why is our presence desired in the kraal of your chief?" Paul continued, maintaining his gravity by an effort, and frowning at his irrepressible comrade. He knew that a Seleke whose dignity has been tampered with is a more unpleasant companion than an enraged orang-otang.