236 
THE NEW AFRICA 
bringing the usual old Mashubia women with com, nothing 
unusual occurred. While asleep under the tree a dead branch 
fell endways on to Hammar’s chest, which he mistook for an 
assegai hurled by some unseen foe, and without moving and 
hardly awake, he coolly said, ‘ Schulz, I ’ve got it at last.’ In 
sitting up, however, he realised his mistake, and said he thought 
it strange that an assegai should not have hurt more. 
At daybreak we were all up and ready to cross, when we 
heard Paul accusing Franz under his breath of something he 
had done that we could not fathom. The chance words we 
heard were, ‘ Franz, you have told a lie, and a lie is a bad thing.’ 
Whatever it was, although we felt certain that it concerned 
ourselves, Paul was too staunch to tell, and Franz kept a 
frightened silence that proved beyond doubt he was guilty of 
some wrong. In spite of all our anxiety to know, we never 
found out what the cause was; nor even months later, when I 
questioned Paul under the promise of strict secrecy, would he 
confess what caused him to accuse Franz of lying. Yet we 
knew the lie materially concerned the welfare of the expedition. 
The most likely solution to this mystery is that Franz had said 
at the outset that we were Boers. We discussed the position 
from its various points, and subsequent events led up to the 
fact that the Boers were much disliked by the natives, and 
probably to this statement we in part owed the ill-treatment 
which Indala had meted out to us in the double fear that we 
were here as spies to investigate the Van Zyl affair, and to ex¬ 
plore a hitherto unknown route into his country. 
