Stay! To be accurate, there is just a strain of Arab in him; faint, indeed, as of several generations intervening, yet real enough to qualify him for mysterious rites of blood brotherhood with some of the most powerful chiefs from Tanganyika to Khartoum. And throughout the Congo territory, and many an equatorial tribe beyond, this man's name has been known and feared. No leader of slave-hunters can come near him for bold and wide-sweeping raids, the terror and unexpectedness of which, together with the complete and ruthless fixity of purpose wherewith the objects of them, however strong, however alert, are struck and promptly subjugated, have gained for him among his followers and allies the sobriquet of El Khanac, "The Strangler." But the reader--together with Johannesburg at large--knows him under another name, and that is "Pirate" Hazon. "Is it prudent, think you, Lutali?" he is saying. "Consider. These Wajalu are a trifle too near the land of the Ba-gcatya. Indeed, we ourselves are too near it now, and a day's journey or more in the same direction is it not to run our heads into the jaws of the lion?" "Allah is great, my brother," replies the Arab, with a shrug of the shoulders. "But I would ask, what have we, in our numbers and with arms such as these," gripping significantly his Express rifle, "to fear from those devil-worshippers armed with spears and shields--yea, even the whole nation of them?" "Yet I have seen an army of the nation of which those 'devil-worshippers' are sprung, armed only with spears and shields, eat up a force three times as large as our own and infinitely better armed, I being one of the few who escaped. And 'The People of the Spider' cannot, from all accounts, be inferior to the stock whence they came." Lutali shrugs his shoulders again. "It may be so," he says, "yet there is a large village of these Wajalu which would prove an easy capture and would complete the number we need." "Then let us chance it," is Hazon's rejoinder. The Arab makes a murmur of assent and stalks away to his own people, while Hazon returns to where he has left his white colleague. "Well, Holmes, according to Lutali, they are bent on risking it," he begins, throwing himself upon a rug and proceeding to fill a pipe. "Are they? I'm not altogether glad, yet if it tends towards hurrying us out of this butchery line of business I'm not altogether sorry. I think I hate it more and more every day." "It isn't a bad line of business, Holmes," returns Hazon, completely ignoring the smothered reproachfulness, resentment even, underlying the tone and reply. "Come, now, you've made a goodish bit of money the short time you have been at it. Anyhow, I want to know in what other you would have made anything like as much in the time. Not in fooling with those rotten swindling stocks at the Rand, for instance?"