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 “Well, well, so it must be!” he answered, but he stamped his staff with rage upon the ground.

“Yes, so it must be,” replied she.

“But you must promise me,” he continued, “that you will not marry another husband.”

“Na-ya,” she cried, bursting out laughing, “na-ya.”

“Then I’ll poison you,” he yelled.

The girl, according to her own account, was alarmed, and went and told her mother and another woman who were working close by the river. They tried to reassure her, telling her that her stepfather was only in joke, but they did not allay her apprehensions.

That very evening, while she was taking her simple supper of water-melon, he called her off and sent her on some message; when she returned she finished her meal, but in the course of an hour or two she was writhing in most violent agony. In the height of her sufferings, she reminded her mother and the friends who gathered round her of what had transpired in the morning. Her shrieks of pain grew louder and louder, and when they were silenced, she was unconscious. Before midnight she was a corpse.

The stepfather was of course marked out as the murderer; the evidence to be produced against him seemed incontestible; the old man had actually been seen gathering leaves and tubers in the forenoon, which he had afterwards boiled in his own courtyard.

The accused, however, was one of Molema’s adherents; he had served him faithfully for half a century, and Molema accordingly felt it his duty to