300 
THE NEW AFRICA 
the act, till Mashabie, hearing the noise, rushed up and authori- 
tively dispersed the women. 
As we handed the bleeding and exhausted Paul from the 
canoe at the crossing, he remarked that they might just as well 
have killed him outright as make such a wreck of him. His 
wounds, however, turned out to be only skin-deep, and with 
proper attendance he soon recovered, and was able to get about 
again, and therewith our Matabele episode ended. 
A kind of lethargy came over us under the influence of com¬ 
plete rest and the good food we enjoyed at Stremboom’s. It 
seemed as if we had reached home somewhere, and did not care 
to go on. The cap-tent waggon he assigned to us as our 
quarters, round which we had a little fence built to keep 
intruders off, was the scene of much laziness, and Stremboom, 
whose trading station was located here, being overjoyed to 
have our companionship to help pass the otherwise solitary 
hours away, exhausted all his delicacies in pandering to our 
appetites, while we were quite unconscious of the inroads we 
were making on his slender stock of supplies, such as tinned 
jam, flour, etc., till one day the good little fellow, setting boiled 
corn on the table, announced that ‘ white man’s scoff’ was ‘ off, 
sirs,’ and we must now content ourselves with native fare. We 
scolded him roundly for his lavishness in using up the flour, a 
food he required much more than we, to sustain his frame, 
already severely reduced by fever, with his stomach not in a fit 
state to digest the coarser food, while we, who never had a day’s 
illness the whole trip, thanks to our quinine, were fit to digest 
everything in the way of food the country contained. However 
Stremboom said that it was all right, for his wagons were com¬ 
ing in by-and-by, and then he would have plenty. 
We were much amused at the king’s behaviour when he 
came to visit us, a matter of almost daily occurrence. Strem¬ 
boom had informed him that we were unlike the traders who 
occasionally visited his country with wagons, to deal for ivory 
and feathers, and who invariably displayed such sycophantic 
behaviour that in one sense the king had a contempt for them. 
