"What on earth do you want so much tobacco for, Hans?" I asked.
"For us three black people to smoke, Baas, or to take as snuff, or to
chew. Perhaps where we are going we may find little to eat, and then
tobacco is a food on which one can live for days. Also it brings sleep
at nights."
"Oh! that will do," I said, fearing lest Hans, like a second Walter
Raleigh, was about to deliver a long lecture upon the virtue of
tobacco.
"There is no need for the yellow man to take this weed to our land,"
interrupted Komba, "for there we have plenty. Why does he cumber
himself with the stuff?" and he stretched out his hand idly as though
to take hold of and examine it closely.
At this moment, however, Mavovo called attention to his bundle which
he had undone, whether on purpose or by accident, I do not know, and
forgetting the tobacco, Komba turned to attend to him. With a
marvellous celerity Hans rolled up his blanket again. In less than a
minute the lashings were fast and it was hanging on his back. Again
suspicion took me, but an argument which had sprung up between Brother
John and Komba about the former's butterfly net, which Komba suspected
of being a new kind of gun or at least a magical instrument of a
dangerous sort, attracted my notice.
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