The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 19

"And these," said the chief, pointing to the girls, who began to wonder what was going to happen, "these are two girls that we captured. They are some of our booty. They are slaves. They are tied there till someone will come and buy them."

Grenfell could not resist the silent call of their woeful faces.

Quickly he gave beads and cloth to the chief, and took the little girls back with him down to the river bank. As they jumped into the canoe to go aboard the S.S. _Peace_, the two girls wondered what this strange new master would do with them. Would he be cruel? Yet his eyes looked kind through those funny, round, shining things balanced on his nose.

The girls at once forgot all their sorrows when they jumped on board this wonderful river monster. They felt it shiver and throb and begin to move. The bank went farther and farther away. The _Peace_ had again started up stream.

The girls stood in wonder and gazed with open eyes as the banks slid past. They saw the birds all green and red flashing along the surface of the water, and the huge hippopotami sullenly plunging into the river like the floating islands of earth that sail down the Congo.

Their quick eyes noted the quaint iguana, like giant lizards, sunning themselves on the branches of the trees over the stream and then dropping like stones into the stream as the steamer pa.s.sed.

_The Slave Girl's Brother_

Then, suddenly, as they came round a bend in the river, all was changed. There ahead Grenfell saw a river town. The canoes were being manned rapidly by warriors. The bank bristled with spears in the hands of ferocious savages, whose faces were made horrible by gashes and loathsome tattooing. In each canoe men stood with bows in their hands and arrows drawn to the head. The throb of the engines ceased. The ship slowed up. But the canoes came on.

The men of this Congo town only knew one thing. Enemies had, only a few weeks earlier, come from down-river, had raided their town, burned their huts, killed many of their braves, and carried away their children. Here were men who had also come from down the river. They must, therefore, be enemies.

Their chief shouted an order. In an instant a score of spears hurtled at the ship and rattled on the steel screens around the deck. The yell of the battle-cry of the tribe echoed and re-echoed down the river.

Grenfell was standing by the little girls. Suddenly one of them with dancing eyes shouted and waved her arms.

"What is it?" cried Grenfell to her.

"See--see!" she cried, pointing to a warrior in a canoe who was just poising a spear, "that is my brother! That is my brother! This is my town!"

"Call to him," said Grenfell.

Her thin childish voice rang out. But no one heard it among the warriors. Again she cried out to her brother. The only answer was a hail of spears and arrows.

Grenfell turned rapidly and shouted an order to the engineer.

Instantly a shriek, more wild and piercing than the combined yells of the whole tribe, rent the air. Again the shriek went up. The warriors stood transfixed with spear and arrow in hand like statues in ebony. There was a moment's intense and awful silence. They had never before heard the whistle of a steamer!

"Shout again--quickly," whispered Grenfell to the little African girl.

In a second the child's shrill voice rang out in the silence across the water, crying first her brother's name, and then her own.

The astonished warrior dropped his spear, caught up his paddle and--in a few swift strokes--drove his canoe towards the steamer. His astonishment at seeing his sister aboard overcame all his dread of this shrieking, floating island that moved without sails or paddles.

Quickly she told her story of how the strange white man in the great canoe that smoked had found her in the village of their enemies, had saved her from slavery, and--now, had brought her safely home again.

The story pa.s.sed from lip to lip. Every spear and bow and arrow was dropped.

The girls were quickly put ash.o.r.e, and as Grenfell walked up the village street every warrior who had but a few moments before been seeking his blood was now gazing at this strange friend who had brought back to the tribe the daughters whom they thought they had lost for ever.

Grenfell went on with his work in face of fever, inter-tribal fighting, slave-raiders, the horrors of wife and slave-slaughter at funerals, witch-killing--and in some ways worse still, the horrible cruelties of the Belgian rubber-traders--for over a quarter of a century.

In June 1906, accompanied by his negro companions, he lay at Yalemba, sick with fever. Two of the Africans wrote a letter for help to other missionaries:

"We are very sorrow," they wrote, "because out Master is very sick. So now we beging you one of you let him come to help Mr Grenfell please. We think now is near to die, but we don't know how to do with him. Yours,

DISASI MAKULO, MASCOO LUVUSU."

To-day all up the fifteen hundred miles of Congo waterway the power of the work done by Grenfell and the men who came with him and after him has changed all the life. Gone are the slave-raiders, the inter-tribal wars, the cruelties of the white men, along that line. There stand instead negroes who cap make bricks, build houses, turn a lathe; engineers, printers, bookbinders, blacksmiths, carpenters, worshipping in churches built with their own hands. But beyond, and among the myriad tributaries and the vast forests millions of men have never yet even heard of the love of G.o.d in Jesus Christ, and still work their hideous cruelties.

So Grenfell, like Livingstone, opened a door. It stands open.

CHAPTER XVIII

"A MAN WHO CAN TURN HIS HAND TO ANYTHING"

_Alexander Mackay_

(Dates 1863-1876)

The inquisitive village folk stared over their garden gates at Mr.

Mackay, the minister of the Free Kirk of Rhynie, a small Aberdeenshire village, as he stood with his thirteen-year-old boy gazing into the road at their feet. The father was apparently scratching at the stones and dust with his stick. The villagers shook their heads.

"Fat's the minister glowerin' at, wi' his loon Alic, among the stoor o' the turnpike?"[49] asked the villagers of one another.

The minister certainly was powerful in the pulpit, but his ways were more than they could understand. He was for ever hammering at the rocks on the moor and lugging ugly lumps of useless stone homeward, containing "fossils" as he called them.

Now Mr. Mackay was standing looking as though he were trying to find something that he had lost in the road. If they had been near enough to Alec and his father they would have heard words like these:

"You see, Alec, this is the Zambesi River running down from the heart of Africa into the Indian Ocean, and here running into the Zambesi from the north is a tributary, the Shire. Livingstone going up that river found wild savages who ..."

So the father was tracing in the dust of the road with the point of his stick the course of the Zambesi which Livingstone had just explored for the first time.

On these walks with his father Alec, with his blue eyes wide open, used to listen to stories like the Yarn we have read of the marvellous adventures of Livingstone.[50] Sometimes Mr. Mackay would stop and draw triangles and circles with his stick. Then Alec would be learning a problem in Euclid on this strange "blackboard" of the road. He learned the Euclid--but he preferred the Zambesi and Livingstone!

One day Alec was off by himself trudging down the road with a fixed purpose in his mind, a purpose that seemed to have nothing in the world to do with either Africa or Euclid. He marched away from his little village of Rhynie, where the burn runs around the foot of the great granite mountain across the strath. He trudged on for four miles. Then he heard a shrill whistle. Would he be late after all?

He ran swiftly toward the little railway station. A ribbon of smoke showed over the cutting, away to the right. Alec entered the station and ran to one end of the platform as the train slowed down and the engine stopped just opposite where he stood.

He gazed at the driver and his mate on the footplate. He followed every movement as the driver came round the engine with his long-nosed oil-can, and opened and shut small bra.s.s lids and felt the bearings with his hand to see whether they were hot. The guard waved his green flag. The whistle of the engine shrieked, and the train steamed out of the station along the burnside toward Huntly. Alec gazed down the line till the train was out of sight and then, turning, left the station and trudged homeward. When he reached Rhynie he had walked eight miles to look at a railway engine for two and a half minutes--and he was happy!

As he went along the village street he heard a familiar sound.

"Clang-a-clang clang!--ssssssss!" It was irresistible. He stopped, and stepped into the magic cavern of darkness, gleaming with the forge-fire, where George Lobban, the smith, having hammered a glowing horseshoe into shape, gripped it with his pincers and flung it hissing into the water.

Having cracked a joke with the laughing smith, Alec dragged himself away from the smithy, past the green, and looked in at the stable to curry-comb the pony and enjoy feeling the little beast's muzzle nosing in his hand for oats.

He let himself into the manse and ran up to his work-room, where he began to print off some pages that he had set up on his little printing press.

At supper his mother looked sadly at her boy with his dancing eyes as he told her about the wonders of the railway engine. In her heart she wanted him to be a minister. And she did not see any sign that this boy would ever become one: this lad of hers who was always running off from his books to peer into the furnaces of the gas works, or to tease the village carpenter into letting him plane a board, or to sit, with chin in hands and elbows on knees, watching the saddler cutting and padding and st.i.tching his leather, or to creep into the carding-mill--like the Budge and Toddy whose lives he had read--"to see weels go wound."

It was a bitter cold night in the Christmas vacation fourteen years later.[51] Alec Mackay, now a young engineering student, was lost to all sense of time as he read of the hairbreadth escapes and adventures told by the African explorer, Stanley, in his book, _How I found Livingstone_.