The fugitives from a lately dispersed werft were staying at Barmen; their cattle had been scattered all about the country, and three men went out on a three or four days’ excursion to look after them. When they returned they came to the station yelling and leaping, and the whole population turned out and joined them in their war-dance. I never witnessed a more demoniacal display; their outrageous movements, their barking cries, the brandishing of the assegais, and the savage exultation of man, woman, and child at the thoughts of bloodshed, formed a most horrible scene. We heard that the meaning of it all was, that the Damaras, who were looking after their lost cattle, had found two of the robbers in the act of driving some of their herd a few miles from this place, and that they had caught the men and killed them. The story seemed improbable on very many accounts, and as the scene of the slaughter was no great distance off, the interpreter and two or three men were sent on the spoor to find out what they could. They returned with the tale that in the middle of a river-bed they had come to a place where the sand was much trodden down, and some blood was dashed about, and from that spot footsteps led in two directions, and with each set of footsteps there was the mark of something being dragged; the first spoor led to a bush on one side of the river where a man lay dead, the other to a thick hakis thorn cover, but nothing could be seen under it though the sand was disturbed. Looking further they found a spoor that went thence by itself right up the river-bed. The interpreter followed it; it was that of a person crawling and dragging himself, and the wretched man whose track it was was found a mile off under a tree in a most pitiable state, with the back of his neck cut through to the bone. It was in the forenoon of the day before that he had been wounded, and it was now past the early morning, but he was still able to speak. He said—and further inquiries corroborated the story—that he and the man that lay dead were loitering about digging roots, when they saw a fire and the three Damaras, from Barmen, eating meat over it; an ox lay slaughtered by their side. They offered to feed them if they would help to carry as much meat to Barmen as they could, so they agreed and went on. Arriving at the river-bed, the three men fell upon their two porters, knocked them down with their knob kerries, and struck them till they were nearly insensible, and then hacked at their necks with their assegais. This one was left for dead, but he recovered, and succeeded in crawling from under the thorn bush to where he was found. The tenacity of life in a negro is wonderful. The object of the murder proved to be simply this—The three Damaras had found cattle belonging to their werft but not to themselves; they were hungry and killed an ox to have a good gorge, and then, not knowing how to get out of the scrape of having