I am very much afraid that most people would consider him rather a bad lot. The fact of the matter is he belonged to another period and other conditions. He was simply a great passionate fighting savage, and, instead of wearing the cast-off clothing of the white man and peacefully driving bullock waggons along a transport road, should have been decked in his savage finery of leopard skin and black ostrich-feathers, showing off the powerful bronzed limbs and body all alive with muscle, and
sharing in some wild war-dance; or, equipped with shield and assegais, leading in some murderous fight. Yes, Jim was out of date: he should have been one of the great Chaka's fighting guard--to rise as a leader of men, or be killed on the way. He had but one argument and one answer to everything: Fight! It was his nature, bred and born in him; it ran in his blood and grew in his bones. He was a survival of a great fighting race--there are still thousands of them in the kraals of Zululand and Swaziland--but it was his fate to belong to one of the expelled families, and to have to live and work among the white men under the Boer Government of the Transvaal. In a fighting nation Jim's kraal was known as a fighting one, and the turbulent blood that ran in their veins could not settle down into a placid stream merely because the Great White Queen had laid her hand upon his people and said, "There shall be peace!" Chaka, the `black Napoleon' whose wars had cost South Africa over a million lives, had died--murdered by his brother Dingaan--full of glory, lord and master wherever his impis could reach. "Dogs whom I fed at my kraal!" he gasped, as they stabbed him. Dingaan his successor, as cruel as treacherous, had been crushed by the gallant little band of Boers under
Potgieter for his fiendish massacre of Piet Retief and his little band. Panda the third of the three famous brothers--Panda the peaceful—had come and gone! Ketshwayo, after years of arrogant and unquestioned rule, had loosed his straining impis at the people of the Great White Queen. The awful day of 'Sandhl'wana--where the 24th Regiment died almost to a man--and the fight on H'lobani Mountain had blooded the impis to madness; but Rorke's Drift and Kambula had followed those bloody victories--each within a few hours--to tell another tale; and at Ulundi the tides met--the black and the white. And the kingdom and might of the house of Chaka were no more. Jim had fought at 'Sandhl'wana, and could tell of an umfaan sent out to herd some cattle within sight of the British camp to draw the troops out raiding while the impis crept round by hill and bush and donga behind them; of the fight made by the red-coats as, taken in detail, they were attacked hand to hand with stabbing assegais, ten and twenty to one; of one man in blue--a sailor--who was the last to die, fighting with his back to a waggon-wheel against scores before him, and how he fell at last, stabbed in the back through the spokes of the wheel by one who had crept up behind. Jim had fought at Rorke's Drift! Wild with lust of blood, he had gone on with the maddest of the victory-maddened lot to invade Natal and eat up the little garrison on the way. He could tell how seventy or eighty
white men behind a little rampart of biscuit-tins and flour-bags had fought through the long and terrible hours, beating off five thousand of the Zulu best, fresh from a victory without parallel or precedent; how, from the burning hospital, Sergeant Hook, V.C., and others carried sick and wounded through the flames into the laager; how a man in black with a long beard, Father Walsh, moved about with calm face, speaking to some, helping others, carrying wounded back and cartridges forward-- Father Walsh who said "Don't swear, boys: fire low;" how Lieutenants Chard and Bromhead--V.C.s too for that day's work--led and fought, and guided and heartened their heroic little band until the flour-bags and biscuit-tins stood lower than the pile of dead outside, and the Zulu host was beaten and Natal saved that day. Jim had seen all that--and Ulundi, the Day of Despair! And he knew the power of the Great White Queen and the way that her people fight. But
peace was not for him or his kraal: better any fight than no fight. He rallied to Usibepu in the fight for leadership when his King, Ketshwayo, was gone, and Jim's kraal had moved--and moved too soon: they were surrounded one night and massacred; and Jim fought his way out, wounded
and alone. Without kith or kin, cattle, king, or country, he fled to the Transvaal--to work for the first time in his life! Waggon-boys--as the drivers were called--often acquired a certain amount of reputation on the road or in the locality where they worked; but it was, as a rule, only a reputation as good or bad drivers. In Jim's case it was different. He was a character and had an individual reputation, which was exceptional in a Kaffir. I had better say at once that not even his best friend would claim that that reputation was a good one. He was known as the best driver, the strongest nigger, the hardest fighter, and the worst drinker on the road.
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