Recognizing my kind thought for their true welfare they thanked
me for it, though with no enthusiasm. Indudu, however, filled
with the spirit of repartee, or rather of "tu quoque", said in
his melancholy fashion that if he and I came face to face in war,
he would be sure to remember my words and to cut me up in the
best style, since he could not bear to think of me languishing on
a bed of sickness without my wife Kaatje to nurse me (they knew I
was touchy about Kaatje). Then we shook hands and parted.
Kaatje, hung round with paraphernalia like the White Knight in
"Alice through the Looking-glass," clinging to a cooking-pot and
weeping tears of terror, faced the foaming flood upon the mare,
while I grasped its tail.
When we were as I judged out of assegai shot, I turned, with the
water up to my armpits, and shouted some valedictory words.
"Tell your king," I said, "that he is the greatest fool in the
world to fight the English, since it will bring his country to
destruction and himself to disgrace and death, as at last, in the
words of your proverb, 'the swimmer goes down with the stream.'"
Here, as it happened, I slipped off the stone on which I was
standing and nearly went down with the stream myself.
Emerging with my mouth full of muddy water I waited till they had
done laughing and continued--
"Tell that old rogue, Zikali, that I know he has murdered my
friends and that when we meet again he and all who were in the
plot shall pay for it with their lives.
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