The hour that followed the rattle of the anchor chain stamped on Norah's brain the impression of a flood of talk, whose waves broke over her head.
Her eyes were on Dick, white clad, tall and elegant, in the centre of a sooty group, whose rags dripped with sweat and whose hands waved in wild gesticulation. Her ears were assailed by the clamour raised by captain and engineer, stokers and crew, gabbling in a dozen tongues explanations of what had happened, conjectures of what might have happened, prophecies of what would happen, while into the babble cut Dick's sharp queries and criticism. Advice, questions, protests, orders, oaths, exhortation rolled in a stream as muddy as the water of the yellow river. Only the sinister figure of the lean Indian passenger kept aloof and silent, contemptuous of past and future alike.
At length the obese engineer detached himself from the agitated mob and vanished below. Reappearing unexpectedly through a hatch, he held out to Dick an armful of warm, distorted metal with the air of an afflicted father submitting to a doctor the corpse of his first-born.
The interruption had the effect of dispersing the conference. Still plying him with questions, Dick led Alibaba aft. Norah, who had little confidence in male brains unassisted, joined them.
As she listened, certain facts emerged. If not dangerous, the situation was at least unpleasant. There seemed no doubt that theMimiwas immobile. Alibaba supported the engineer in insisting that the engines (connecting rod, was it?) were damaged beyond his power of repair.
'I said it was monstrous,' remarked Dick. 'Only niggers to run the ship.' He turned to the Arab. 'Why can't you patch them up?' he asked.
Alibaba spread his hands and gabbled apologetically. Norah gathered from the polyglot flow that welding or brazing was necessary, and the bellows of the boat's portable forge were under repair at Kigoma. In any case the job was too big for theMimi'sresources.
'Well, what do you mean to do about it?' asked Dick sourly.
Alibaba was silent. He foresaw that the solution he eventually proposed would be ill-received. They must stay where they were till the ship could be towed into Kigoma, 300 miles away.
The fellow's a fool,' said Dick. 'He doesn't know his job! Why not rig a sail, man?'
Without replying Alibaba licked his finger and held it above his head. Mildly he remarked that the dead calm would hold till the rains broke. It might be weeks.
With much head-shaking he rejected a suggestion of Norah's, opining that an attempt to tow the steamer behind her dinghy would end after an hour in mutiny. 'Black fellow he say "too much work no good"' was his comment.
A second fact had to be faced. Not only was the vessel stranded, but no rescue could be expected from Kigoma or elsewhere for many days. TheMimiwas not due at Kigoma for forty hours, and a further delay of two or three days would not be sufficiently unusual to excite attention. When she was a week overdue, alarm would be felt. But even so, there was no British boat on the lake to send. Kigoma would have to get in touch with Albertville across the water and ask the loan of one of the three Belgian steamers. If the Belgians were willing and a boat was available, she would have to cross the lake and make slow progress close inshore, visiting each bay and natural harbour, until she caught sight of the derelict.
Alibaba's estimate that relief could not be expected for at least twelve days did not strike Norah as pessimistic.
'This'll learn me,' said Dick, 'to trespass into the Stone Age!' He stared disconsolately across the blue water. A thought struck him: 'What about a dhow? Surely there are Arab dhows on the lake?'
Again Alibaba shook his head with the deprecatory tolerance of an Anglican divine. Before the English took the land from the Gerimani[1] there had been much trade, and fleets of dhows. But now ... in any case the calm before the rains would keep dhows beached in their harbours. And why should a dhow visit this deserted bay?
[1] Germans.
Norah, who did not share Dick's depression and at first looked on the breakdown as an exciting adventure, cast her eyes to the land, from which, it seemed, must come their help. Would it not be easy to despatch one of the crew to the nearest village bidding them send a runner to the first white settlement with news of the plight of theMimiand her passengers?
There were no villages, said Alibaba reluctantly, no natives, no settlements. Sleeping sickness had wiped the coast clear of life. In the old days smoke from the fires of fishing villages had shown blue on the shore, but at present... He waved his hand in the direction of the ruined tower, and Norah felt she understood something of that tragedy.
Silence fell on the little group. It testified to the rugged nature of the country that no one suggested a march inland or along the shore. As if painted on the back-cloth of a stage, before their faces rose the encircling wall of the dead volcano. Sheer cliffs that any advance inland must scale. The broken formation, which Norah had noticed from the lake, of spurs and buttresses, that radiated inwards from the crater sides, interset with mountain torrents and precipitous valleys, made progress parallel to the lake almost impossible. Should the castaways be bold enough to attempt either of these desperate marches, braving the risk of sleeping sickness, where could they find carriers for their loads—tents, cooking pots, ammunition, and food?
'The mouse has indeed fallen into the bucket,' thought Norah, as she walked forward with Dick. Alibaba, crestfallen at the failure of his charge, offering no cure but patience, retired in silence to the engine-room.
Dick dropped heavily on to his bed.
'Well,' he said at last, 'it looks like staying here a fortnight till we're rescued by a crowd of grinning Bulamatadi.'[2]
[2] Belgians.
'A fortnight will soon be over,' said Norah cheerfully. But she felt a shadow had fallen between her and the sun. In a fortnight she had hoped to be on the high seas, steaming towards Europe. It did not seem so easy to escape from Africa.
Dick did not answer, misfortune had pricked his buoyancy.
'It's lucky we have got the oxen on board,' she went on. 'We've only two days' food in the boxes, and I don't want you to go shooting with S.S.[3] about...'
[3] Sleeping sickness.
She caught her breath in the middle of the sentence.
'Dick,' she cried. 'What idiots we are!' He did not look up. 'Dick, how far is it across the lake to the other side?'
'Forty or fifty miles,' he replied gloomily. 'We can't move a foot.'
'No, but the dinghy can!'
'What d'you mean?'
'With four oars we'd do it between dawn and dark! Or nearly.'
'What's the good?'
'You're not your brightest, dear... At the worst we'd be on the route of the Belgian boats. At the best we'd strike a Belgian Boma or mission.'
Dick's gloom was dispelled, and he hurried aft to requisition the skipper's knowledge of the lake. In answer to his shouts Alibaba emerged from the secret places of the ship. His smiling face signalled to Norah that her plan was passed. Even the lean Indian was interested. She wondered if he had at first been drugged with hemp and the effects had now worn off.... What an interminable amount of talk between Dick and the skipper! How men did talk!
'We start at dawn!' Dick greeted her at last. 'It'll be a long day, let's go and stretch our legs ashore.'
'Don't be maddening, Dick! Start at the beginning!'
The reaction from anxiety had been too much for Dick's self-control. He was bubbling over with excitement.
'Sorry, darling.' He kissed her on the cheek. 'Well, Alibaba says there's a Belgian poste, which is Bulamatadi for Boma, opposite here and about twenty miles north. The lake is under forty miles across here, so we'll be over to-morrow night and drinking beer with the Chef du Poste the next day. A happy issue to all our afflictions, what?' Dick's spirits easily went up or down, and he rattled on. 'Alibaba is picking four of the best oars among the thieves, and there'll be just room for Changalilo and the baggage. We'd better take a goat, too. He'll do as a mascot, if we don't have to eat him.'
'What about the others?' asked Norah, who had not Dick's happy absorption in self.
'What about them?' he stared at her for a moment, 'why they'll be all right. They'll stay here till we get word through to Kigoma.'
Leg-stretching ashore ended in sleeping there. Norah was reluctant to leave the ship, but Dick's enthusiasm swept her objections aside.
'It's safe enough if we're careful,' he said. 'The "palp"[4] never goes far from water and shade.' He pointed to a strip of bare rocky ground that lay at the back of the amphitheatre of the bay. Above it rose a sheer red cliff. For a quarter of a mile there was neither water nor tree. 'At night,' he continued, 'out there there's no fear of fly. Here there's the certainty of a stench of oil and crew. Not to mention the roll. Besides, I want to repack my kit.'
[4] Glossina palpalis—the sleeping sickness fly.
Changalilo quickly loaded the baggage into the dinghy, leaving, at Dick's instructions, the heavy ammunition chest on board to cross intact next day. The loaded magazine of Dick's Mauser was enough for emergencies on shore.
There was some difficulty in finding oarsmen. The crew had settled down to a gamble on the forecastle, slapping on the deck the dice made of cowrie shells filed smooth on one side, and betting which way they would turn.
When at last the boat was ready to start, Norah remembered the oxen. Even if their fate was slaughter, till the day arrived their life would be more endurable on shore, where the hands could build a lion-proof kraal.
'Can we manage them?' said Dick. He was unwilling to incur the extra work till the skipper's opposition to Norah's plan—from laziness, he thought—converted him, and, on the principle of 'worst first,' the ox, who had nearly pitched Dick into the hold the evening before, was lowered into the water.
They had paddled the greater part of the quarter mile that separated the steamer from the shore, when Obadiah the ox, as Dick had christened him, suddenly varied the puffing and snorting with which he met each wavelet, by a plunge that threw his quarters out of the water, and a bellow in which Norah, accustomed to cattle, could read an agony of fear and pain. He lashed out, plunging and rearing. His forelegs churned the water to bubbles that were dark with sand scooped from the bottom. His maddened struggles rocked the heavily laden boat.
'Look out, Changalilo; he'll have us over!' shouted Norah.
The frenzied beast, released by Changalilo, slipped rapidly astern, as if drawn by a current. As he passed her, Norah was moved by the agonised appeal in his mild eyes. A stain more sinister than sand now darkened the water. She looked at the deck hands and saw that they were resting on their oars, pointing with widely grinning mouths at the contortions of the ox. Bellow on bellow filled the air.
'What on earth is it, Changalilo?' she asked. Then as his lips framed the world 'ngwene,' she understood. 'A crocodile's got him?'
'Yes,' shouted Dick, 'look!' and she saw a black tail flick out of the water.
'Poor brute,' she sighed, and turned her eyes away.
The struggle receded from the amused view of the oarsmen, as the crocodile relentlessly drew his victim towards the southern arm of the bay. There was no hurry; he had a good hold on a hind leg and in twenty minutes or so the ox would be drowned and wedged on a certain muddy bank, where the swollen corpse could rot the time required to make it palatable.
In the distance the agony continued, now a fore-leg showing above the surface, now the wide horns, now the white belly.
'Do make them row in, Dick,' said Norah. 'It's horrible!'
Reluctantly they paddled the dinghy inshore. As the bows grated on the shingle an apparent log lying near the edge of the yellow river rose to its feet and disappeared into the safety of the stream.
The momentary glimpse of the rough scales dried khaki-grey in the sun, the pale wicked eye, the high hind legs, which sloped the obscene body at a slinking angle down to the crooked forelegs, recalled the monstrous saurians of the prehistoric past.
'And, by Jove, there's another!' whispered Dick, nodding his head at a couple of black knobs on the surface of the water, that represented the snout and eyebrow of a submerged monster. He reached for his gun and fired. A long, pale belly cartwheeled into the air with slashing tail and legs, to sink without a sound and be devoured, perhaps still living, by its mate.
Camp was pitched in silence on the site already chosen by Dick, and the deck hands were sent off grumbling to collect firewood. Norah was oppressed by the desolation of the bay, once the scene of hopeful and devoted enterprise, now delivered over to reptiles. A curse seemed to rest there, and she wondered whether by passing a night on these shores she submitted to its power.
Here the pale Galilean had not conquered. The gods of Africa had shown they still could wield their old weapons of remorseless disease, sudden death, and instantaneous decay, installing at the end a garrison of reptiles, cruel and hideous like themselves, the survivors of more ancient and horrific epochs."
"I don't mean," said Ross, "that Norah, who was a healthy-minded little thing, really believed such stuff. She was upset by the pitiful fate of the ox under her impotent eyes, and felt a distinct, if unreasonable, dislike for the place.
She was tempted to ask Dick to take her back to the steamer. But as the wish crossed her mind, she heard the report of his gun up the beach. He was amusing himself, bless his heart. She knew men did not welcome feminine intuitions that make them alter their plans, and thrust the impulse aside as cowardly.
But when she recollected that rapturous first sight of Tanganyika, and the hopes it had raised of quick release from the forest's encirclement and of an easy passage along azure waters to the civilisation her heart desired, disillusionment was keen. Would she ever be free, or had Africa put out a tentacle that had retaken her to its dark bosom? Would Africa master her as it had mastered this ruined mission?"
* * * * * * *
Ross rose and stretched his arms above his head. He lit a match to see his watch.
"The work of white men's hands," he remarked, "does not seem to prosper on the shores of the lake. Ujiji, for instance, is smaller to-day than it was in Livingstone's time; Niamkolo is a mound of bricks hidden in the grass; Kigoma, since we took it, grows smaller every year....
The history of the ruined tower that filled Norah with such foreboding, I never heard. Whatever the doom, it fell before my day. Still, it is not hard to imagine the birth and death of the station. Think of the arrival of the French Fathers....
With heavy rosaries hanging below their untrimmed beards, wide hats on their heads, clad in white robes of coarse cloth, they had sailed from some elder station on the lake into the unknown.
Think of the start of their voyage in a home-made boat of clumsy lines, whose unpainted white wood planks showed the roughly-nailed joints. Overhead on a light framework was stretched an awning to shield them from the sun of indefinite days.
The Father who built the boat came with them to the edge of the water, a carpenter's apron over his white robe, and stood shading his eyes beside the little red fire on which he had warmed the pitch to give the seams a final caulking. The other Fathers stood in a group under the mango trees at the top of the shallow brick steps that led to the lake, silently speculating on the fate of their brothers whom they might, or might not, see again.
For many days the adventurers were rowed by native Christians to the singing of Catholic hymns learnt in place of the melancholy water songs of their ancestors. At last the canoe stopped at a fishing village that once populated the bay.
Long beards and robes won for the Fathers the respect due to wizards. Moreover, there would be hope of their help against the Arab slavers, who at that time led a train of bones and blood across Africa, whose dhows were familiar in passage up-lake to Ujiji, whence they drove their wares overland to Bagamayo for shipment to the markets of Zanzibar. Had starvation and hardship unduly reduced their cargo, the loss was soon made good from the lake villages.
In return for protection from this menace, the villagers would be willing to build a church. They were simple folk and glad to help those who seemed kind and good men.
So, as the seasons succeeded each other, a group of buildings sprang up on the lake shore. The layout would be like that of the other lake missions. A monastery would spread its length ..."
"Ross," I interrupted, "have you ever read a book calledSandford and Merton?"
"No," said Ross. "Is it interesting?"
"Interesting?" I replied. "Hardly interesting...."
"The monastery," continued Ross placidly, "would spread its single—or double-storied—length parallel to the lie of the lake. The roof would be low-pitched with a wide overhang supported on brick pillars, to form a dark spacious verandah from whose centre a double flight of steps descended to the courtyard. At right angles on one wing lay stores and outbuildings; and on the other stood the church with narrow unglazed windows, round brick columns, scanty fittings, and the ornaments of Latin Catholicism, when humble so devotional, so secular when rich.
Gardens were dug, fruit trees planted, crops cultivated. All the time proceeded the less material work of tending the sick, teaching and preaching. Permanganate of potassium and epsom salts, sermons and hymns, reading, writing and the other queer things they teach the heathen—Christian philosophy and the geography of the Holy Land.
By how much the black man profited, I shouldn't care to say, but I don't doubt that the community grew and multiplied. The birth-rate increased; famines were averted; refugee relatives from raided villages came in, and the blessings of the first chapter of Genesis seemed to rest on the devoted labours of the Fathers, until ...
The first 'fly' may have been brought by one of the refugees or carried by game or spread naturally up the lakeshore. At the beginning the presence of the destroyer would not be suspected. The increased death-rate would be attributed to an unhealthy summer; the wasting of the sufferers to fever; their fits to epilepsy; their madness to insanity.
But as the buryings increased, the fear of an epidemic must have gripped the hearts of the Fathers. Their slight medical knowledge was as unavailing as their prayers. Bells will have sounded, masses been said, and litanies sung for defence from the arrow that flieth in darkness and the pestilence that destroyeth at noonday. But the mortality did not stay.
Finding the new God did not help them, some of the people will have relapsed into heathendom. At first frightened, they would settle into a mute endurance, nearer apathy than stoicism. The more energetic would flee from the doomed villages ... and spread the sickness with them. The rest awaited the end with fatalism.
One by one the Fathers buried their people, mourning the loss now of some favourite convert, now of some skilful workman.
Whether the sickness ultimately struck all the white men, or whether, since they could not help, they took the resolution of abandoning the stricken settlement and their lives' work, one does not know. Alibaba's words, a later discovery of Norah's, and the French Fathers' tradition of self-sacrifice, suggest that death found them at their work. The end was the same in either case: Africa took back its own, and the insatiable forest swallowed up villages, buildings, and every sign of life, as relentlessly as it had always engulfed every trace of human endeavour."
I interrupted the silence that followed Ross' last words with a hint that the fate of the abandoned mission hardly touched on the story of Norah and Dick.
"So you think," said Ross, "that no emanation from the tragedies of the past lingers over their scene. I cannot bring myself to believe that the strip of land from Dixmude to the Vosges will ever quite lose the breath of four years' agony and heroism; though I know there is a view that those years may now be forgotten. However, I am telling this story and you must allow me to suggest that the wind of that elder tragedy still ruffled the beauty of the bay, blowing cold on Norah's heart. But since, however, you prefer strictly material facts, I will skip her presentiments, simply mentioning that they were interrupted by the reappearance of the two deck hands, who had collected, they considered, sufficient wood.
As Norah watched the dinghy, rowed towards the steamer's masthead light, recede from the now darkened shore, a great sense of loneliness filled her—that microscopic feeling engendered, for instance, by an imprudent glance at the stars.
It was succeeded by more practical apprehension.
'I wonder if we should have kept them,' she thought. 'What would happen to us if the boat...'"
Norah woke before it was light. She made no attempt to recapture a sleep that dreams had disturbed—dreams in which the ox was drowned again, in which a crocodile pursued her leaden steps while the Indian's crooked knife held Dick from her rescue. As soon as her watch showed half-past four, she summoned Changalilo from the fire which he had tended through the night, waking at intervals as a native will. Yesterday it had been decided to strike camp before dawn, giving him time to cook breakfast and carry their loads down to the shore ready to start at the first gleam of light.
Breakfast finished, Dick led the way to the beach. When they were twenty yards away, they heard a quick scrunch on the shingle and a quiet plop in the water.
'Ngwene,' said Changalilo casually, and kept back from the lake's edge, where the crocodile they had disturbed still might lurk.
They waited, Norah's hand in Dick's. The water was warmer than the air, and a mist hung on its surface. Above the mist the mountains across the lake were already outlined against a faint sky.
Voices on theMimi, carried by the water, were audible.
'Damn Alibaba!' said Dick. 'Why can't he send the boat?'
Norah felt her last night's uneasiness return. 'But it's early yet,' she said.
The talking on board continued. Alibaba's voice was recognisable, raised in command or protest.
'He's having a job getting the boat's crew out,' said Dick, in answer to an unspoken anxiety.
Dawn came suddenly, and the water showed a delicate misty blue, as if it were seen through silvered crystal. Dick raised his voice in a hail. The sounds on the steamer ceased. She was visible now, squat and black on the water, but the distance was too great to distinguish figures in the group that darkened the deck.
Dick hailed again.
A silence seemed to brood on the face of the waters till the banal reassurance 'All right' floated to them on the motionless air.
'That wasn't Alibaba?' asked Norah.
Dick shrugged his shoulders in nervous irritation. He was angry with Alibaba, angry with himself.
Soon, however, the sight of black figures climbing over the stern dispelled his apprehension. 'That's better,' he sighed, 'but why five of them? We don't want more than four oars.'
As the boat approached, Norah noticed that for the long row its crew had discarded the unfamiliar European oar, reverting to the pointed paddle of their fathers. This looked like business. She took a last glance at the shore, where she had sensed such sinister influence, and smiled at her unfulfilled forebodings.
What the devil's that blasted Hindoo doing in the boat?' cried Dick suddenly.
Norah looked and saw the Indian's sardonic features momentarily revealed over the rising and falling shoulder of the bow-paddler, an ape-like negro, whose hunting knife, stuck in his belt, lent a piratical air to a personality no doubt genial enough.
'I'll jolly soon have him out of that,' muttered Dick.
As if his intentions had been divined, the uplifted paddles were checked and the silver water dripped from their narrow blades. The boat swung broadside on, a stone's-throw from land, rocking gently. Norah was near enough to see the perturbed, uneasy features of the crew that contrasted with the ironic composure of the Indian. He rose slowly to his feet from his seat in the stern. His thin lips twisted into a smile. His beaklike nose and the naked, withered skin of his neck reminded Norah of a vulture that had settled on a buck she had shot on the farm.
He stood for a moment in silence, smiling at the Europeans.
'Yesterday,' he began nasally, 'the Sahib struck this slave for remaining seated in the Sahib's presence. The slave now stands.'
'Cut that out,' shouted Dick, 'and paddle the boat inland at once.'
The habit of obeying white men stimulated the gorilla-like stoker to dip his paddle in the water, but the Indian stopped him with a gesture.
'Surely, Sahib, when my words are ended, we will paddle to land.'
His hand, waved gently towards the Belgian coast, explained his meaning.
'Yesterday the Sahib forbade his slave to interfere in his affairs. He will now lay the lake between himself and those affairs.'
He threw back his head and laughed noiselessly. Dick went red with rage.
'The damned nigger...' he cried.
Under her breath Norah whispered to him to take his gun.
'It's him or us,' she said.
'Do you mean?...' began Dick, then broke off. 'Hell!' he shouted. Why did I waste those cartridges yesterday?'
'Why——' began Norah.
'I emptied my magazine on a croc last night,' he confessed. 'I thought I had another handful in my shooting jacket.'
'Then bluff him with the empty gun. If you can frighten the Indian, the natives will turn.'
But if Dick was a bluffer, his was not the brand that pulls off forlorn hopes. His belief in the avarice of the Indians who colonise Africa suggested an easier plan. Holding out his purse, he shouted promises of lavish reward, if the Indian would take them off.
The offer made to the crew might have had effect. Their simple minds were free from hostility or mistrust. But in the dominant heart of the Hindoo, vengeance, and doubt that promises would be honoured, displaced cupidity.
He gave the order to paddle.
Too late Dick ran to the loads and snatched his gun. The dinghy had drawn out into the lake. 'Stop,' shouted Dick, 'or I'll fire.' His words recalled to Norah's brain the games of her childhood, and in spite of her anxiety she had to smother a smile.
The Indian stopped laughing and crouched in the bottom of the boat, urging speed on the paddlers. He put his faith in the increasing range and the mist which still covered the water. For some seconds after every one had recognised the pretence Dick stood, gun at shoulder, theatrical, ridiculous. Then with an oath he dropped the Mauser.
Already remote, the Indian's laugh rang out above the là! ... là! ... là! ... of the paddlers, half chant, half grunt of exertion.
Then distance enveloped the sounds.
The position was desperate. Without ammunition or stores of food, life was impossible on shore. Between shore and steamer the water teemed with crocodiles. They had no boat or the materials to build one. No help could be expected from the land, no rescue for many days from the lake. When at last the relief party came, it was doubtful if there would even be bones for them to find....
But Norah's courage, which had shrunk before the intangible menace of the bay, rose to meet the concrete disaster that appeared to have overwhelmed Dick. With Changalilo's help she unpacked the food boxes and measured the margin between them and starvation.
Even the scant array of tins that Changalilo produced proved to be misleading. It included such innutritious aids as baking and curry powder, anchovies and Worcester sauce—the armoury of Colonials against the monotony of ulendo meals. The solid residue was meagre, for they had brought on board only enough food for the normal trip of three days, counting for emergency on the ship's supplies and on purchases from fishing villages. What was now left would last them two bare days. And Alibaba had said that rescue could not come for twelve.
Norah looked towards Dick, who had subsided on the pile of baggage, his head in his hands. She decided to tell Changalilo first. He accepted the position with the indifference of one accustomed to famine, and with the native's inherited communism added his rations—a cloth full of millet meal—to the common store.
'What are you doing?' asked Dick in a dull voice.
She turned to him a little brusquely. After all, if Dick hadn't quarreled with the Indian, if he hadn't insisted on sleeping ashore, if he hadn't wasted his ammunition, they wouldn't be in this mess. He ought to pull himself together and help; there must be some way that a man could find to retrieve the disaster.
She was conscious that she was unfair and feminine, but with all their independence the present generation of young women admire a muddler as little as did their grandmothers.
'Come on, Dick,' she said briskly, let's think this out.'
'I've done nothing else, since that swine rowed off,' said Dick.
She made him listen to the result of her commissariat calculations.
'That's worse than I thought,' he said; 'our number's up.'
'Of course it isn't. Don't be such a pessimist.'
Dick drummed on the boxes. 'Unless you can do a fortnight without food,' he said.
She restrained her impatience.
'Are you sure you haven't any cartridges anywhere?'
'Quite—I looked through my kit last night. I could have sworn...'
And while he explained and excused his folly, Norah wondered what would have happened half an hour before, had Dick's rifle been loaded. A sudden doubt of his resolution assailed her. With a loaded gun in his hand, would he have dominated the mutiny? In his rage he might have fired, but in cold blood she doubted if, even to secure their escape, he could have screwed himself to the killing point.
Surprisingly she was sorry. Not, I think, from any hate of the Indian, pre-eminently unlovable as he was, but from a feeling that if logic barred all other paths a man should kill. And as a woman and an aristocrat, if a life lay between her and safety, she instinctively demanded a man's love to ... eliminate the obstacle.
In the comparative comfort and security of a deck chair on an ocean liner, such sentiments seem blameworthy even in a woman. In her father's stately home in the Shires or her father-in-law's respectable legal circle in Scotland, I have no doubt that Norah, whom I have presented to you as no paragon, would have shrunk from so drastic a solution. But I suppose standards suffer when you are in danger of life in Central Africa.
In justice I record that she did not pursue the thought; she turned to wondering what Archie would have done. Probably nothing, she decided. By the time he had weighed the advantages and disadvantages of drastic action, opportunity would have flown. But when at last he moved, she admitted that Archie generally went to the heart of the matter.
Of one thing she was certain. His Scottish stubbornness would not allow him to beg from a man who had insulted him and whom he had struck. Nor would he offer money. She tried to put out of her mind that picture of her lover, pale in the dawn, unconscious of the water lapping over his feet, holding out his purse to his enemy.
In this, you may remark, she was unjust. At one moment she blamed Dick for not securing her safety by a cold-blooded murder, at the next she tried not to despise him for attempting to save her by the much less reprehensible methods of bribery and a trifling surrender of pride.
She was recalled from her reflections. Dick had ended his explanation and had asked her a question.
'There must be a way out,' she said at random.
'Yes,' he laughed nervously. 'We could swim to theMimi... at least we could swim the first ten yards.... Norah,' he said suddenly, 'I believe that would be the best thing to do.'
The part of Norah's brain that was not under Dick's spell wondered cynically what he would say if she agreed. Then she felt ashamed of her sneer. Was not the greater part of his distress on her behalf?
'We can't make a boat without tools,' he began again, and rekindled her irritation. All this talk of what they couldn't do was utterly vain. Her woman's brain had jumped to the only course that lay open, moving along no path of reason, accepting the only practicable picture that offered.
'Dick,' she said, 'we must strike inland.'
'And hardly any of these African woods float,' went on Dick, monotonously pursuing his line of thought. There's no second boat on board.' ... Then the hope that he had been repressing burst to the surface. 'Norah,' he said, 'do you think there's a chance of those paddlers bringing back the dinghy from the other side?'
'No, dear, I don't,' she said gently. Then, as if she were dealing with an invalid, 'You see, they know they've behaved badly, and natives in the wrong get frightened like naughty children. They'd be afraid of being punished, if they came back.... No, as soon as the Indian lets them go, they'll disappear to their villages.'
The last pitiful hope that had lingered, disappeared. In his heart, he could almost have cursed the elopement, which threatened to prove fatal to both of them. Yet, as he looked at Norah, the robuster part of him declared her worth it. In the sea of blood spilt for women, no fairer face can have been mirrored.
She stood bare-headed, her short hair stirring, her chin up and her eyes bright with courage. He noticed where the lake sun had caught the skin on her arms. It was borne on him that his attitude lacked worth. An aristocrat-on-the-scaffold gesture was indicated. Or perhaps something more tender. 'Darling,' he whispered, with his faint Irish intonation, 'I'd die happy in your arms.'
As he laid his cheek against hers, he sensed a slight rigidity. Had he struck the wrong note? Norah was sometimes disconcertingly practical.
'"There is a time for marrying, and a time for giving in marriage,"' she quoted under her breath. 'Now, be sensible, Dick,' she went on aloud, 'and listen to me. There's no need to talk about dying, but it's no good looking to the lake for help. Our best chance is to strike inland and hope to hit a village or a native path leading to one.'
Dick felt his flourish had miscarried; but in spite of himself, his sinews were braced by Norah's example.
She developed her plan. Not wasting any of the forty-eight hours that were assured to them, they must struggle up the mountain side, the three of them, with the food on their backs. When night overtook them, they would lie between two blazing fires to protect them against beasts. Then push on in the dawn, till they had left the sleeping sickness belt and reached inhabited country once again. If their luck held, they should strike a village or a village path before their food was gone.
'How are you going to get over that?' Dick waved his arm toward the crater wall.
There must be a pass somewhere.'
'We may take days to find it.'
'We must leave something to chance.'
But Dick was no gambler, and the idea of laying out all their food on the possibility that they would find a path frightened him. He thought of the stories of travellers lost in the bush, walking in despairing circles. Where they were, they at least had water.
'It would be better if I went to find the way alone, without a load on my back, and came back for you.'
'If you didn't find it, you'd have to come back just the same. We'd be no further on, with a day wasted.'
'A dhow might have come in or a canoe from a village along the coast.'
Norah said nothing. Though she did not put into words the criticism of her lover, she knew the futility of arguing with a man who prefers a sixty-six to one miracle to a short price chance.
After a brief silence Dick expounded his scheme. There was a hope that the valley of the yellow river led to a pass. He would follow the stream to its source, from every vantage point searching with field-glasses for sign of human life—boat on the lake, path, garden or village in the forest.
Norah gave in. Human eyes she knew could penetrate short distance into the forest, and she had small faith in the plan. But Dick had taken the initiative, and she was not sure enough of her own scheme to force its risk on him. In any case no time must be wasted in argument.
'All right, dear; I'll come the first bit of the climb with you.' Her new-born insight into his nature advised her to keep him under way. Followed by Changalilo, they ascended the course of the yellow stream.
Fantastically tangled roots, growing apparently in air, and a lattice work of creepers formed a wall that forbade progress along the bank, but, at that season of the year, it was possible to walk along a strip of shingle that bordered the bed of the stream. Up this they toiled until their advance was barred by a little waterfall, which boiled through a gap in rocks worn smooth and red, and fell in spray on the rounded boulders below.
Dick decided to deviate into the forest. From where they stood it was possible to divine the course of the river through the trees, until it disappeared circling round the base of a column or chimney of natural rock, whose throat torn raggedly open showed where a small volcano or blowhole had once belched its stream of lava. Dick intended to slant through the forest and rejoin the river by the chimney.
'I'll go back here,' said Norah. 'Changalilo, stay with Bwana Dick to show him the way back to-night.'
'The Bwana said I was never to leave the Ba-Mama[1] alone in the forest,' protested Changalilo.
[1] Ba-Mama—lit. "Grandmothers" (plur.). The respectful term for all influential ladies—white women or native princesses.
'What Bwana?' asked Dick.
'Bwana A-ri-shy,'[2] replied Changalilo firmly.
[2] The Awemba cannot pronounce consecutive consonants without inserting a vowel. Changalilo meant Archie.
As Norah retraced her steps, she repeated Changalilo's words. He still regarded her as Archie's possession. In her scorn for the condemnation of others, it had never entered her head to consider the opinion of the natives on her flight with Dick. She knew that while the Chiwemba tongue contains no word for a virgin—an ideal that is unfamiliar to this direct people—they looked with an unsympathetic eye on adultery. The code of the good old days, before the white men came, allotted death, she believed, to the guilty pair. Fantastically enough, the existence of this point of view in a backward and little known people carried weight with her.
She dismissed it from her mind and faced the danger that confronted her. The practical side of her nature was uppermost. She saw that two factors—Time and Food—dominated the situation and threatened to sign the death warrant. She could not shorten the days that must precede a rescue, she could increase the food supply. Fish there must be in the lake, fruit there might be in the ruins. As she had no fishing tackle, she decided first to explore the mission.
As she approached the ruined tower, the superstitious dread which the place inspired in her was reinforced by a more concrete fear of snakes. She was a better zoologist than Omar, and knew that 'the keeping of courts where Jamshyd gloried' was more probably entrusted to puff adders and cobras than to lions and leopards.
But fruit trees would have been planted near monastery walls, and to the need for food terrors, supernatural and material, must yield.
As she picked her way through the long grass which surrounded the tower, her foot touched masonry. Treading cautiously, she identified the remnants of a flight of broad steps that once, she supposed, led to the lake. Now their easy gradient was distorted and reft. At one point they ceased completely, at others they slanted drunkenly. The grass that covered them, knee high, made the ascent dangerous.
She stood at the foot of the tower. To her right creeper-grown mounds showed where the chancel lay. She penetrated a clump of trees, dark like citrus, but she found them an outpost of the forest and no domesticated variety. Now she could see a gaping, jagged rift, following the bonding of the brickwork that explained the quick destruction of the station. An earthquake had associated itself with the more patient forces of the forest in the work of obliteration. She wondered that the tower still stood.
Beyond the grass-covered mounds, into which the monastery walls had decayed, she found a grove of mangoes ... the late sort whose fruit, it seemed odd to reflect, might not be ripe till she was dead. In what once had been the courtyard some oranges had reverted to stock. Even so they were fruitless, their season past. Her biggest haul was a handful of small, hard peaches from what had been an orchard. It was doubtful if the trees had ever flourished in the great heat of lake level.
There were no other European trees except the cypresses that edged the terrace on which the monastery had stood, their dark spires pointing men to heaven. But Norah was reminded of Archie's farm and the avenue of young cypresses that led to the new house. She remembered searching the forestry catalogue with Archie, and the Latin name of the Italian cypress—cypressus funebris—crossed her mind with significance now sinister.
Another clump of cypresses led her from the main ruins to an enclosure whose containing wall the destroying forces had spared. As she clambered through a gap she saw the reason of their tolerance. It was the mission cemetery, and here the pride of man was already humbled.
A crudely-hewn stone proclaimed that Alibaba's words had been literal, and that at least one of the White Fathers had died at his post. She wondered how long the news had taken to reach the French village he had left so long ago, and whether there had been any relatives to remember an old man who had endured exile, danger, and death for his faith.
Round him, in their almost obliterated graves, lay his adopted people.
The Christian practices are only able to reduce, by a few years and by the faint memory which mound and stone briefly preserve, the eternity of oblivion that waits. Norah wondered if the old native form of burial—an unmarked hole in the uncharted bush—was not at once less pretentious and, when you bargain with infinity, as effective.
With her miserable handful of peaches, she left the desolation of the mission for the solitude of the shore.
She must face the problem of catching fish without tackle or net. Changalilo's spear, she thought, might have served, had it not formed the sole defence of the party in the hills. Her mind flew to Dick where he felt his way through the forest. Why had she let him go without her? Suppose, without a gun, he ran into lion or buffalo!
She pulled off the cording of the loads and set to work. After more than two hours' labour, a net of sorts was finished. Clasping it, she scrambled on to the breakwater of rocks that theMimihad turned as she entered the bay.
From talk on the farm, she knew that tiger fish lie under white cliffs. These rocks were white—great round boulders worn smooth like marble in the years that had elapsed since they crumbled from the cliffs above and piled haphazard one on another. She had noticed divers and egrets sitting motionless on the edge. Where were fishing birds there must be fish. As she clambered along the slippery surface she surprised an otter, sitting in the sun with head alert and paws spread like a Landseer lion. Her precarious approach disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets, who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost hurt the eye.
Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.
But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour she had caught nothing. Neither tiger fish with rat-trap teeth that cut through wire casts, nor iron-grey ngombe, whose narrow head and jaws fight the fisherman like a true salmon of the lake, nor yellow, blue-blotched coupi, nor pande, the gigantic perch of Tanganyika, rewarded the efforts of her aching arms.
The sun scorched pitilessly off the rocks, and, as pitilessly, thought seared her brain. When Dick came back that night without accomplishment, they would have one day left to eat. It seemed incredible that in time of peace and in the twentieth century, enjoying full health and strength, with money in her pocket, without an enemy in the world, death should lurk so near. But her appetite—for she had given Dick the lion's share of the day's rations—confirmed her reasoning.
The sun was low above the mountains when she desisted from her unavailing task and returned to camp. She noticed with relief that the store of wood was not spent and she set to work to kindle a blaze.
How much longer would Dick be? Surely he would be back before dark! What news would he bring? Her eyes searched the hillside in vain. She took her field-glasses to the shore and looking back she tried to penetrate the maze of trees. As she raked the hillside, hope leapt within her. High up, near the torn throat of the little volcano, in the fading light, she saw a native.
Dick must have found a village and help was coming.
Then her heart turned to lead. It was Changalilo ... alone. Her worst fears had come true: something had happened to Dick. The criticism that had been forming in her mind since the fiasco of the dinghy fell to dust. Dick was dead or disabled. Her gallant, lovely Dick.
She would have stumbled into the hills, but fear that she would miss Changalilo in the dark restrained her. She waited.
* * * * * * *
An hour she waited, till Changalilo appeared noiselessly in the firelight. He saluted in silence.
'What has happened?' she forced herself to ask.
He did not speak. Her eyes, which had been trying to read his expressionless features, fell till they rested on his hand decorously holding a letter. She snatched it.
'Darling,' it read, 'we're saved. Just seen a camp fire in the bush. Chang says it's a white man. Will spend night with him and join you to-morrow. All my love.—DICK.'"
* * * * * * *
Ross broke off. He remarked that the air was a little cooler and that he thought he could snatch a little sleep in the interval between stifling night and sweltering day.
We went below. As we reached the companionway:—
"To-morrow," he said. "I'll tell you how optimistic was that letter. No will-o'-the-wisp ever led wayfarer farther from safety than that camp fire led Dick."
"The blooms of the almond tree grow in a night and vanish in a morn: the flieshœmerœtake life with the sun and die with the dew: fancy that slippeth in with a gaze goeth out with a wink: and too timely loves have ever the shortest length.
"I write this as thy grief and my folly."
R. GREENE.
It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on his bald head.
His burly, masculine figure seemed incongruous among the welter of empty deck-chairs and the futile debris of a voyage—women's wraps, rope quoits, cushions and picture papers. Side by side we leant over the rail, and for a while our tongues were busy with the idiocies that pass for events on a liner—the ship's run, the latest quarrel, and so forth. A pause gave me the opportunity to remind him that he was in the middle of a story.
"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked, surprised. I said that I was interested to know what happened, resisting the temptation to add that I could spare some of the moralising with which he garnished his facts.
"About the hour," he began again, "that Norah received the note, Dick was finishing a second helping of roan antelope by the side of the fire he had described.
'So I followed for hours,' he was saying, 'till the path stopped dead at a drinking pool. Not a trace beyond.'
'Game track,' suggested the stranger on the other side of the fire.
'That's what my "boy" said when we struck it. I didn't believe a path so well-used and hard-beaten could be anything but human-made.'
'There's not a human for miles,' said the other. 'Except ourselves,' he added, glancing round the enclosure, where the firelight picked on a cheekbone or a line of teeth, an eye-ball or the protuberance of a hip to suggest rather than reveal the presence of a dozen natives.
'There must be rhino by the score,' persisted Dick, 'to flatten out a path like that.'
'Zebra do a lot. The hoofs of a herd of zebra working regularly between two drinking places.'
'Anyhow, neither was much help to me. So I decided to push back to ... to my base and try again to-morrow. Just before dark I saw your fire.'
'Lucky we lit it early. They're frightened of lions. Always are in uninhabited country.' He jerked his head in the direction of the palisade which surrounded the camp. The farthest glint of the red fire revealed a sort of ragged fence of saplings, eight or ten feet high, sharpened and staked into the ground with leafy boughs laced in between.
'You alone?' asked the stranger.
'I had only one "boy" with me, and I sent him back to camp,' prevaricated Dick.
In telling his story he had avoided mention of Norah. This was only prudent in a country, the affairs of whose tiny white population are common property; but the result had made his tale a little like the Book of Genesis without Eve, and he realised that to maintain this discretion would be increasingly difficult. For the moment, however, he temporised.
His first emotion on catching sight of that point of light through the trees had been unqualified delight. His spirits, which his intimate friends called 'mercurial,' had shot from the depths of despair, where a day of futile wandering had lodged them, to an almost arrogant elation. He only waited to scribble a line to Norah before he plunged across country in the direction of the light.
But that beacon, as if it possessed the qualities of the hope it inspired, proved illusive. Soon night overtook him struggling through thickets and stumbling over outcrops. Perhaps those physical obstacles imposed a pause for thought, for before he reached the camp, he had begun to wonder with what cloak to cover his rather ambiguous position. For the moment he could only decide on a policy of caution. The line he took must vary with the number, condition, and temper of his rescuers. It was possible that he only had to deal with natives.
Except that this guess was wrong, scrutiny of the figure, that sat opposite with eyes shaded from the fire heat, revealed little. The mystery may have been partly due to a lack of interest in third parties habitual to Dick. But in truth there did not seem to be anything very remarkable about the owner of the fire. He was youngish, shortish, darkish. Not a missionary, one would say, or an official or a trader, even had that desolate region offered souls for saving, bodies for the governing, or wants for the supplying.
That he was no plutocrat progressing triumphantly across the continent on a well-boomed shooting trip, the absence of blameless hecatombs of slaughtered buck and poisoned carnivora proclaimed. The modesty of his appointments—Dick was reposing his aching limbs on a packing-case and his host was as ill-provided—and the shabbiness of his torn shorts and frayed shirt underlined the point. Taken all round, an unnoteworthy man whom you would never pick out of a crowd. But as there was no crowd for a thousand miles to pick him from, the appearance of the Apollo Belvedere could not have been more welcome, or indeed more surprising.
Several leading questions designed to dispel the mystery were allowed to fall to the ground unanswered.
It is not impossible that, irritated by these feelers, the stranger was moved to repay in like coin. At any rate he followed up his disconcerting, 'You alone?' with a no less awkward, 'I don't know your name?'
'Brown,' said Dick Ward, after a moment's pause.
'Ah!' said the unknown, eyeing him, to Dick's mind, a trifle aggressively. 'Mine's Smith,' he added after a pause.
Suspicion of mockery crossed Dick's mind, causing him to glance quickly at his host. He appeared immersed in thought. At length he produced the result of his deliberations.
'Better start at dawn,' he said.
'Start?' echoed Dick. 'Where for?'
'Abercorn,' was the monosyllabic reply.
The announcement was not to Dick's taste. In the first place he did not like his plans made for him. Moreover, in his sanguine heart he had reckoned on a loan of at least enough provisions to carry Norah and himself to the nearest white settlement.
But now the man Smith was proposing—almost dictating—a double back into Rhodesia and an amalgamation of forces that would discover Norah's presence. And, as there were people at Abercorn who knew both her and Archie, he would have to tell the truth.
A shade stiffly then (it would never occur to Dick that Smith was in a position to offer whatever arrangement suited him) he replied that he didn't think he could manage to make for Abercorn, adducing as an excuse the state of his feet, which had suffered from the stony and precipitous route he had that day followed.
Smith heard him out without any expression on his face that would reveal his opinion. 'Matao,' he said to his capitao, 'the fire.' He seemed to collapse into his thoughts.
A native, naked save for his blanket, extracted his sprawling limbs from the fire-lit group that talked in sibilant whispers only broken by suppressed laughter at some scandalous tale. From the firewood pile he pulled the pale trunk of a tree long dead, eaten to a skeleton by white ants, and pitched it on to the fire. The impact released a shower of sparks and a flicker of flames that lit the underside of the overhanging boughs, showing their leaves livid against the richness of the sky, like the pattern on a brocade.
That's right, Matao,' said Smith, and relapsed into silence. Then, with the tone of one who had been reasoning all the time—'You see,' he said to Dick, 'you see, I haven't anything I can leave you. I haven't any tins myself or meal for my carriers. So I can't give you any.'
Dick, to whom salvation had seemed assured, felt as if he had been pushed off a cliff. 'We're living on what I shoot,' went on Smith after a pause; 'unfortunately I'm short of ammunition. Bloody short. What guns have you got?'
'Seven point nine Mauser and a heavy Westley Richards,' replied Dick dully.
'So, even if I could spare you any, it wouldn't fit.' Smith seemed to muse. 'I've got a 7.9 at home,' he continued. 'I might have a round or two in my bag. But not enough to be any use.'
A native rose from the fire and disappeared in the direction of the tent, returning at once with the stranger's heavy rifle. Some word understood in the conversation had recalled an unfulfilled task. He took his place by the fire and, producing a bundle of bits of rag, Rangoon oil and a pull-through, sat cross-legged cleaning the gun.
'That's Johnny, my fundi,'[1] said Smith. 'Saved my life the other day. Didn't you, Johnny?'
The native, who did not understand a word, laughed and his teeth flashed white in the darkness.
[1] "Fundi"—native hunter.
'So,' went on Smith, whose conversation seemed to follow his thoughts rather than his words, 'we'll have to stick together and do long days to Abercorn and live on what I shoot. I've got ammunition waiting at Abercorn,' he added.
Dick saw that Norah's presence could no longer be concealed. He had no other excuse for rejecting the stranger's scheme. He wished he had been more open from the beginning. Confession was difficult now. In any case a complete explanation to this not very sympathetic stranger was unthinkable. He took the plunge.
'You see, there's my wife,' was his phrase.
The stranger looked at him as if he were going to speak. But when ultimately he did, it was only to say, 'You didn't tell me Mrs. Brown was with you.'
Dick saw that silence was his best defence, and held his tongue while Smith submerged into one of his periods of thought. Dick waited anxiously on the words of this rather mysterious being who held Norah's life and his in his hands. Eventually the arbiter of destinies spoke; more exactly, he whistled.
'We're in a bit of a hole,' he said.
That first person plural relaxed Dick's tautened muscles.
'We'd never get a lady as far as Abercorn,' Smith continued. Dick agreed with a whole heart. 'I've only got enough carriers for my loads. None for her kit, let alone a machila.... If I increased their loads, we'd never make the distance.'
'How far is it?' asked Dick.
'God knows. I'm a stranger in this country, so are my natives. From what you tell me of your trip up the lake we must be over two hundred miles from the south end. Abercorn's twenty miles on.... That's by water—dodging mountains and ravines makes it longer. For instance, there's a road on the other side between M'pala and Badouinville. It's three hours by water and two days on foot.'
'Then why Abercorn?' asked Dick, attaining his objective.
Smith explained that while he didn't know his way to any Boma or settlement on this side of the water, Abercorn would be found by following the lake. And touch need never be lost with drinking water.
'But it's out of the question now,' he declared. 'I was counting on doing it in a fortnight. With the dozen odd rounds I've got, luck and good shooting, we should have been all right for food. But Mrs. Brown could never do twenty-five-mile days.'
Dick agreed.
'I suppose you think,' began Smith, and stopped. 'I'd better tell you,' he began again, 'what I'm doing here without ammunition or food. Else Mrs. Brown may wonder....'
Dick murmured a deprecatory phrase, which fortunately for his curiosity was ignored.
The account which the stranger proceeded to give of himself was not very detailed. He had, Dick gathered, been after elephant somewhere in the Congo. Wonderful game country, not far from the lake. So many elephant that he had used up most of his big bore ammunition. He had plenty of .303 stuff, but his .303 rifle had been twisted into scrap metal by the wounded bull Johnny had saved him from. (Hundred-pound tusks he had.) Then he got into trouble with the Bulamatadi. ('Poaching,' thought Dick.) So that there was question of confiscating his ivory. He'd got too much to risk losing, and he'd induced a fishing village to paddle him and his ulendo across to the British side.
'A bit risky, wasn't it, in a canoe at this time of year?' suggested Dick. 'What if a squall got up?'
'Risky?' repeated Smith. 'Yes, I suppose so. I had to pay the paddlers pretty high. Or rather their headman. I couldn't get enough canoes, either. That's why I left most of my stuff behind.'
He had crossed at night and landed a day's stage north of the present camp. Dick mentally supplied the missing detail of a reverent burial of the ivory on the beach. Now he was on his way to Abercorn.
'But of course I'll stay and see you and your wife through,' he added.
Dick was suitably grateful, but Smith was apparently already thinking of something else.
'We'll have to see what can be done,' he went on. 'Maybe my chaps could build a raft and we could edge our way along the coast till we reach a fishing village.... I'd better move camp alongside of you first thing to-morrow and get to work,' he reflected. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, 'I suppose Mrs. Brown has got a gun.'
Dick explained that the gun was ammunitionless.
'But,' protested Smith, 'you can't leave her alone there without a gun!'
'You're safe from crocs, on land, aren't you?'
'Yes, I think so, but...'
'She's got lots of firewood.' Dick was not as easy as he pretended, but he resented his host's interference, 'and there's not a hope of finding our way down in the dark. It's nearly vertical in parts, and I'm not sure of the way. Even in the daylight we'll have to wait for my "boy" to guide us.'
'Well, she's your wife, not mine,' said Smith, prompted possibly by some attendant angel with a taste for Greek irony.
As if to dismiss the matter, he reached out and offered Dick a cigarette. The metal of the case caught Dick's eye as he accepted, for elephant hunters do not, as a rule, sport gold, and curiosity impelled him to decipher the words engraved inside. The fire had sunk to a glow, but the sardonic-minded angel, anxious to see the fun, whispered to the stranger to kick the smouldering logs, and a tongue of flame licked high enough for Dick to read the words 'Archie from Norah' followed by a date that his retina had not recorded, ere the light had sunk.
There shot through Dick's being a fear as luminous as that arrow of fire and as quickly sped. Of course, even in the small white circle of Central Africa there must be lots of men named 'Archie,' who were given things by women called 'Norah.' Why should not Smith's Christian name be Archie? 'Archie Smith,' a perfectly convincing combination.
He could not help recalling with faint uneasiness that suspicion of mockery when the stranger declared his name. Had he been given a Roland for his Oliver, a Smith for his Brown?
But, even if his name were not Smith, why should it be Sinclair? Archie Sinclair, who was hundreds of miles away 'on cattle business,' presumably at Elizabethville.
With a start he realised that his host had asked him a question. Intent on the problem of the man's identity, he chanced assent, and was relieved when the answer proved adequate.
Of course the fellow might have found or even stolen the case. It certainly was not natural for a hunter to possess such an article ... if he were an elephant hunter. He was up to the knees in a morass of uncertainties; there seemed no bottom to the mystery; but until he was on firm ground, exhausted as he was, he knew he would not sleep. How could he get at the truth? One couldn't very well say to a man, 'I say, Smith, is your name Sinclair? Because, if so, I'm sleeping with your wife.' Nor could he interrogate natives in their master's presence.
Whatever happened, he must escape from this morose tête-à-tête, whose suppressions were driving him to idiocy. Conversation, he felt, would choke him; without it solution was no nearer. He rose to his feet with a gesture of weariness that was not assumed.
'You must take my bed,' said the putative Smith, moved again by the Spirit with a taste fordouble entendre.
He escorted Dick to the tent and left him there while he went to give orders for his own bed of leaves. Once alone, no pedantic delicacy restrained Dick. With the flair of a private detective, he found a handkerchief. Granted a good wife, this might solve the question. But the emblem 'A.S.' that rewarded his search and testified to a modicum of wifely devotion, only reduced the field to Archies, Sinclair or Smith.
It was not until he thought of looking under the bed that the myth of the latter's existence was exploded. There lay an old uniform case which its owner had preserved from army days. Painted on it, he read, '2nd Lieut. Archibald Sinclair, R.F.A.'"