"If the snow goes on I shall lose my oxen," he said to himself; "they
can never bear this cold."
Hardly had the words passed his lips when the wagon shook; there was a
sound of breaking reims and trampling hoofs. Once more he looked out.
The oxen had "skrecked" in a mob. There they were, running away into
the night and the snow, seeking to find shelter from the cold. In a
minute they had vanished utterly. There was nothing to be done, except
wait for the morning.
At last it came, revealing a landscape blind with snow. Such search as
could be made told them nothing. The oxen had gone, and their spoor
was obliterated by the fresh-fallen flakes. The White Man called a
council of his Kaffir servants. "What was to be done?" he asked.
One said this thing, one that, but all agreed that they must wait to
act until the snow melted.
"Or till we freeze, you whose mothers were fools!" said the White Man,
who was in the worst of tempers, for had he not lost four hundred
pounds' worth of oxen?
Then a Zulu spoke, who hitherto had remained silent. He was the driver
of the first wagon.
"My father," he said to the White Man, "this is my word. The oxen are
lost in the snow. No man knows whither they have gone, or whether they
live or are now but hides and bones. Yet at the kraal yonder," and he
pointed to some huts about two miles away on the hillside, "lives a
witch doctor named Zweete.
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