1812. 
A FABRICATED STORY. 
497 
And on my offering to accompany such a party, to protect them with 
our guns, his tone of refusal became still more positive and seemed 
to indicate that he was displeased at my entertaining even the bare 
idea of venturing to go among so dangerous a tribe of men. He 
then informed me that the detachment, which was lately sent to 
pursue the robbers who carried off the cattle, had returned almost 
immediately, as they were afraid to advance against the enemy ; or 
rather, as I suspect, were afraid to overtake them. On his boasting 
that, if I had not been at this time on a visit to him, he would have 
gone against them himself with the whole body of his people, I said 
that I would leave Litakun, and remain absent on a hunting excur- 
sion, till he returned ; but his answer then was, that he must wait 
till the season of hot weather, before he could make his intended 
attack. 
During this conversation, I remarked that he mentioned nothing 
which might not have been known and seen while those travellers 
were at Litakun on their way to the more northern tribes ; and 1 
therefore endeavoured, by various questions, to discover such cir- 
cumstances as could have become known by no other means than by 
a complete plundering of their waggons ; but I could obtain only 
such answers as were mere evasions of my questions, or such as were 
inconsistent with the other parts of his story, and served only to 
strengthen my former suspicions that the whole was nothing else 
than a fabrication, for the purpose of creating in the minds of white 
men a prejudice against those tribes towards whom he entertained 
either enmity or jealousy. That this was the object at which he 
aimed, was sufficiently betrayed by his frequent exclamations against 
the Nuakketsies, and by his often repeating, with peculiar earnestness, 
that the governor of the Cape must send a strong body of men to 
punish them severely for this murder. When I asked how it could 
be possible for a numerous body of men to find provisions in his 
country, when even so small a party as mine, were unable to obtain 
at Litakun the necessary daily food, he replied, that he would engage 
to give them both oxen and corn, and would, moreover, accompany 
them himself with all his people. I then told him, that the governor 
VOL. 11. 3 s 
