On their return these officers found the skeletons of the Bakwains where they expected to find their own goods.

All the corn, clothing, and furniture of the people, too, had been consumed in the flames which the Boers had forced the subject tribes to apply to the town during the fight, so that its inhabitants were now literally starving.
Sechele had given orders to his people not to commit any act of revenge pending his visit to the Queen of England; but some of the young men ventured to go to meet a party of Boers returning from hunting, and, as the Boers became terrified and ran off, they brought their wagons to Litubaruba.

This seems to have given the main body of Boers an idea that the Bakwains meant to begin a guerrilla war upon them.

This "Caffre war" was, however, only in embryo, and not near that stage of development in which the natives have found out that the hide-and-seek system is the most successful.
The Boers, in alarm, sent four of their number to ask for peace! I, being present, heard the condition: "Sechele's children must be restored to him." I never saw men so completely and unconsciously in a trap as these four Boers were.

Strong parties of armed Bakwains occupied every pass in the hills and gorges around; and had they not promised much more than they intended, or did perform, that day would have been their last.
The commandant Scholz had appropriated the children of Sechele to be his own domestic slaves.