"Yes, Missi," he replied; "if you will help me now, I will be your friend forever."
I answered, "I am your friend. That brought me here and keeps me here."
"Yes," said he very earnestly, "but I want you to be strong as my friend, and I will be strong for you!"
He quickly answered, "I want to get married, and I need your help."
I protested,--"Nelwang, you know that marriages here are all made in infancy, by children being bought and betrothed to their future husbands. How can I interfere? You don't want to bring evil on me and my wife and child? It might cost us our lives."
"No! no! Missi," earnestly retorted Nelwang. "No one hears of this, or can hear. Only help me now. You tell me, if you were my circumstances, how would you act?"
"That's surely very simple," I answered. "Every man knows how to go about that business, if he wants to be honest! Look out for your intended, find out if she loves you and the rest will follow naturally,--you will marry her."
"Yes," argued Nelwang, "but just there my trouble comes in!"
"Do you know the woman you would like to get?" I asked, wishing to bring him to some closer issue.
"Yes," replied he very frankly, "I want to marry Yakin, the Chiefs' widow up at the inland village, and that will break no infant betrothals."
"But," I persevered, "do you know if she loves you or would take you?"
"Yes," replied Nelwang; "one day I met her on the path and told her I would like to have her for my wife. She took out her ear-rings and gave them to me, and I know thereby that she loves me. I was one of her late husband's men; and if she had loved any of them more than she loved me, she would have given them to another. With the ear-rings she gave me her heart."
"Then why," I insisted, "don't you go and marry her?"
"There," said Nelwang gravely, "begins my difficulty. In her village there are thirty young men for whom there are no wives. Each of them wants her, but no one has the courage to take her, for the other nine-and-twenty will shoot him!"
"And if you take her," I suggested, "the disappointed thirty will shoot you!"
"That's exactly what I see, Missi," continued Nelwang; "but I want you just to think you are in my place, and tell me how you would carry her off. You white men can always succeed. Missi, hear my plans, and advise me."