XXV MAD BUFFALO AND FAITHLESS WIFE 
233 
my inquiring of him the cause of his unusual low 
spirits, he replied :— 
‘ Oh, bwana, do you wonder at my feeling de¬ 
pressed ? My wife must have taken another 
husband, for that is why the buffalo tried to kill 
me.’ 
All my endeavours to laugh the fellow out of 
this curious belief proved futile, and he, for whom 
life had always been an affair of bubbles and 
butterflies, went about his work a changed being. 
Curiously enough, two months after this little 
conversation, some of Malingum’s friends, hailing 
from the Fipa country, near Lake Tanganyika, 
about three hundred miles away, turned up at 
my camp, bringing with them a note for my 
tracker from his brother. On learning from this 
missive that his wife had deserted him for another 
man, my tracker at once brought the note for 
my perusal. 
‘ Read this letter, bwana! ’ he cried. ‘ Didn’t I 
tell you that my wife must have been faithless to me 
when that accursed buffalo endeavoured to kill me ? 
You laughed at what you called my superstitious 
beliefs—what do you think of them now ? However, 
now that I am certain, my mind is at rest. She is 
nothing to me, for I can get plenty of younger and 
prettier women in every village to which we go. As 
for a wife, when I return to my own kraal, I shall 
