Jonker had up to the present time acted very fairly, but rather despotically to all the whites. He had always protected their persons and property, and had often stood their friend against the other Hottentots. Even the Damara missionaries were greatly indebted to him for the security they enjoyed; for the belief was, that any harm done to them would be instantly retaliated by the much-dreaded horsemen of the Hottentots. But Jonker liked to have his own way, and soon became heartily tired of advice and admonition; and more lately his plundering disposition and that of the Hottentots had become so thoroughly roused, that the rebuking presence of the missionaries was felt to be extremely irksome and galling, and he constantly expressed his determination to rid himself of them. Still they entertained no personal cause for alarm, but the attack on Schmelen’s Hope had placed the matter on a different footing, and their position was become avowedly very perilous. The Damaras, from their suspicious nature, always believed the missionaries and other white people to be merely a species of Hottentot, and acting as spies to Jonker. They argue thus,—“You come and go without harm, passing through their country; you must therefore be as one of their people;” and now that the Damaras had been killed all round Mr. Kolbe, and he himself not murdered, they firmly believed that he went there merely as a decoy to bring Kahikenè within Jonker’s reach. There was nothing revolting in such a line of conduct in the Damara mind, for they seem to have no perceptible notion of right and wrong, but it was considered to be a simple fact, and as such they acted upon it, by entirely gutting the Schmelen’s Hope house the instant that Mr. and Mrs. Kolbe had made their hurried retreat from that place to Barmen.