The Ivory Trail Part 56

I gave them the blanket to bury him in, and we poled the Queen of Sheba insh.o.r.e to find a place to dig a hole, leaving the body stretched on some tree-roots while we prospected. We should have known enough by that time to leave four or five men on guard close by; as it was, when the men still on board the dhow began kicking up a babel, Fred and I came running and jumping back through the marsh just in time to see a crocodile wriggle off into the water, with the corpse in his jaws feet first. Fred fired a shotted salute, but missed, and that ended that funeral.

By day we pa.s.sed villages on higher ground, where we might have procured more food if we had dared run the risk of meeting Germans. It was likely enough the villagers were so used to dhows that they would not trouble to report having seen us in the distance; but it was perfectly certain that if we paid them a visit they would pa.s.s word along from mouth to mouth with that astonishing, undiscoverable ease that is at once the blessing and bane of governments.

So Fred wasted hot hours with the only rifle, trying to hunt meat on a sh.o.r.e where all the four-legged game had been ran down by the natives, or butchered by the German machine-guns long ago (for to teach Sudanese mercenaries the art of rapid fire in action their officers marched them out to practise on herds of antelope. There was game in plenty away from the lake, but none where the German officer could conveniently practise his profession.)

We tried to shoot ducks and geese; but a rifle at long range is not the best weapon for that sport. We shot very few, and then only to discover the invincible repugnance natives have to eating "dagi" as they call all birds. We kept ourselves alive, but did not solve the problem of the ever-diminishing supplies of rice for our men.

Somebody thought of fishing. We found hooks in a crevice in the Queen of Sheba's bow, and made lines from a frayed rope. But although the sh.o.r.e was lined with traps in which the inhabitants no doubt took fish in proper season, all that we caught was one miserable finny specimen, all head and mouth and tail, that the natives said would poison any one who ate it. The truth was, of course, that they preferred rice to anything, and, African native-like, would eat nothing else as long as rice was to be had, having no earthly notions of economy. When the rice was all gone on the fifth day out of Muanza they raided a banana plantation before we knew what they were up to, and came back gorged, with bunches enough to feed them for two or three more days.

The fat was in the fire then, of course. We paid the owners handsomely, giving them their choice of money or blankets when they bore down on us in long canoes demanding vengeance. They voted for blankets and money, but vowed they would far rather have the bananas, because now their own people would be on short commons to make up for the surfeit of ours.

We left them never doubting that they would send word to the nearest German officer. (They told us there was a wood-cutting station within a "few hours," and we prayed he might be only a non-commissioned man in charge of it, but knew that prayer was too sweetly reasonable to be answered where the German Gott makes war on foreigners.) Kazimoto a.s.sured us he heard them telling one another they would make complaint against us within the day.

It remained, then, only to guess where that steam launch might be. We were approaching the northern end of Ukerewe, not a day's sail, if the light wind held, from the narrow mouth of the channel between Ukerewe and the mainland. That was the likeliest place for the launch to lie in wait; it was where we would have waited had we been pursuers and they the pursued. So we decided after a council of war to put the helm over and sail almost due westward, hoping to meet with an island where we might stop for a few days, catch fish and dry them, and caulk the leaky dhow, without the risk of letting the Germans know our whereabouts. (It is a peculiar fact that whatever the native secret system of transferring messages may be, it does not work across water.)

Not all the little G.o.ds of Africa were fighting for the Germans, although it began to seem so. An hour after putting up the helm we sighted a school of hippopotami--fifty at least, and for half a day we chased them, Fred trying to shoot one until Will and I objected to further waste of ammunition. A dead hippo would have provided us with meat enough for a month for the whole ship's company. We could have towed the carca.s.s ash.o.r.e somewhere and dried the meat in slabs. But the glare on the water made shooting very nearly impossible (Fred's eyes were sore from it); and if we should meet the Germans those remaining cartridges would be our only hope. But the diversion took us out of sight of land, and that stood us in better stead presently than tons of fresh meat.

Whether the Germans heard us, or were merely quartering that part of the lake in wait, we never knew. Probably they heard the shooting in the distance and gave chase. At any rate, within ten minutes of Fred's last wasted shot Coutla.s.s caught sight of smoke and announced the fact with his favorite oath.

"Ga.s.sharamminy! The launch!"

At first we were all in a stew because there was no land near, where we might have beached the dhow and scattered. It was an hour before our advantage of position dawned on us, and all the while the launch approached us leisurely. She had plenty of fuel; the wood was piled high above her gunwale in a stack toward the stern; but those on board her seemed to take more pleasure in contemplation of our defenselessness than in speed. She steamed twice around us slowly before closing in; and then we made out Schillingschen's hairy shape, leaning against the cord-wood with a rifle between his hands.

"Shoot him! Shoot him, by Jiminy!" urged Coutla.s.s, but Fred was not so previous as that. We were not yet on the defensive. We counted five rifles, in addition to Schillingschen's protruding above the launch's side, and we all took cover in the hope either that they might decide we were not the dhow they waited for, or else that they might come very close out of curiosity. For Fred had a plan of his own. Rifle in hand, he crawled under the hot tarpaulin and lay flat on the reed deck, Will crawling after him to s.n.a.t.c.h the rifle in case Fred should be hit.

"Steer straight toward 'em!" Fred called to me, as soon as it was evident that the launch did not intend to pa.s.s us by. "Keep headed toward them!"

That was not easy in the light wind, until Schillingschen tired of staring at us and gave an order to the engineer. Then they laid the launch broadside on to our bow at about two hundred yards' range, and without a word of warning opened fire on us from all six rifles, Schillingschen devoting his first attention to myself at the helm.

Our lone rifle cracked in reply, but they could not see Fred and did not guess where to shoot in order to search him out. They came no nearer, but circled slowly around us, only Schillingschen's bullets appearing to come anywhere near the target, until a yell from below showed what their real plan was and I understood why the sail was not ripped and no bullets whistled overhead. They were shooting through the planking of the dhow, endeavoring to ma.s.sacre the helpless crowd below, and no doubt to sink her and drown us as soon as she was full enough of holes.

A wounded Nyamwezi came scrambling on deck, spouting blood from his neck and crazed with fear. He jumped overboard and tried to swim toward the launch, but one of the Germans. .h.i.t him in the head at the third shot and he disappeared. Then one of Schillingschen's elephant bullets slit my sleeve, and the next one pierced my helmet.

"Put one into Schillingschen, Fred!" I shouted, but Fred did not answer. He kept up a very steady succession of shots that were doing no good at all that I could see.

Another German bullet found its mark below deck in the thigh of the Goanese. He might have known enough to lie quiet, having some alleged white blood in him, but instead he, too, came struggling to the after-deck, bellowing like a mad-man. Coutla.s.s knocked him back below with a blow on the chin, and he there and then threw the whole crowd into a panic by screaming and kicking. They all began to try to swarm together through the narrow opening, and those in the rear tore at the reed deck.

Into that pandemonium went Coutla.s.s, armed with nothing but h.e.l.lenic fury, thoughtful of nothing but his lady-love--surely reckless of his own skin. He beat, kicked, bit, scragged, banged their foolish heads together, cursed, spat, gouged, and strangled as surely no catamount ever did. Brown leaped in to lend a hand, and into the midst of that inferno three more bullets penetrated, each wounding a man. Lady Waldon, mad with some idiotic strategy of her own sudden devising, seized the tiller and tried to wrench it from my hand. The Syrian Rebecca, imagining new treachery and fearful for her Greek lover, tried to prevent her with teeth and nails. The Germans raised a war-whoop of wild enjoyment. And just at the height of all that, Fred's three-and-twentieth shot went home.

There was a loud report, followed by instant nothing except stampede on the part of the Germans to get out of reach of something. Then the something grew denser; invisible hot vapor became a pall of steam that bid the launch from view, three more shots from Fred's rifle finding the proper mark by sheer accident, for there was another explosion; the cloud increased and the launch stopped dead.

"That gray sheet of metal wasn't her boiler at all!" Fred shouted back to me. "The first shot pierced the boiler when I found out where to aim! I think three of them are scalded badly--hope so!--high pressure steam--superheated--did you see? Now leave 'em to find their own way home!"

"See if you can't get Schillingschen!" said I.

But Schillingschen was invisible in the white cloud, and Fred refused to waste one of the half-dozen cartridges remaining. The light wind that bore us away from the launch also spread the screen of steam between us and them. A shot or two from Schillingschens rifle proved him to be still alive, and still determined, but missed us by so much that we began to dare to sit upright. Then Fred went below to sort out wounded men, plug holes in the dhow, and stop the panic, and we all prayed for wind with a fervor they never exceeded in Nelson's fleet.

When Will had gone below to help Fred, the panic had ceased, two dead men had been thrown overboard, and six of the crew had been set to work bailing in deadly earnest to keep ahead of the new leaks, there was time to consider the position and to realize how hugely better off we were than if the launch had caught us somewhere close insh.o.r.e. Now we could sail safely northward, every puff of wind carrying us nearer to British water and safety, whereas unless they could mend that high-pressure boiler, they would have to lie there for a week, or a month--die unless some one came in search of them. Had we holed their boiler near the sh.o.r.e they would have been able to take to the land until they found canoes. Good canoes, well manned, could have overhauled us hand over fist like terriers after a rat.

It was fifteen minutes yet before we were out of rifle range, and Schillingschen tried to make the most of them when the steam thinned, exposing his beefy carca.s.s recklessly. But by the time it had thinned down sufficiently to let him really see us we were too far away to make sure shooting. He slit the sail, giving us half a night's work to mend it, and made three more holes in our planking, but hurt n.o.body.

That was the only launch the German government had on the lake in those days, an almost perfect toy with an aluminum hull and more up-to-date gadgets on her machinery than a battleship's engineer could have explained the purpose of in a watch. They had lavished a whole appropriation on one show. From the minute we were out of range of Schillingschen's big-bore elephant gun we ran risk of starvation, and perhaps surprise, but no longer of pursuit, and we headed the Queen of Sheba as nearly as we could guess for British East with feelings that even Lady Waldon shared, for she grew distantly polite again, and complimented Fred on his cool nerve and accurate shooting.

We should have suspected treachery, for she made no attempt to retaliate on Rebecca for scratching her face. Unnatural inaction should have put us on our guard. She even went so far as to compliment the maid on "finding such a great, strong, brave man as Coutla.s.s to cherish her." The Greek simply cooed at that--threw out his great chest and rearranged with his fingers the whiskers that had almost totally disguised him.

(There was not one of us but looked like a pirate by that time. The natives of that part of Africa shave every particle of hair from their bodies whenever they get the chance, and prefer their heads as shiny and naked as any other part of them. But the German prison system, devised to break the spirit of whoever came within its clutches, included prohibition of shaving, so that we had the woolliest crowd of pa.s.sengers imaginable.)

We found it impossible to help being sorry for Lady Waldon, or even for the maid, who suffered in spite of Coutla.s.s's kisses and strong arms.

The obvious fact that the dhow was no place for a woman made us overlook the conduct of both of them over and over again, shutting eyes and ears to Lady Waldon's meanness and the maid's increasing impudence.

Lady Waldon actually began to set her own cap at Coutla.s.s, encouraging him to boast to the porters, and pretending to admire the gift with which he told them tales in Kiswahili that would have made even her blush if she had understood the half of them. At intervals the maid grew jealous, and had to be kissed back to serenity by Coutla.s.s, who was no less in love with her because of any mere addition to the number of his interests. He could have made hot love to six women, and have enjoyed it. There were times when he really flattered himself that Lady Waldon admired his looks and fine physique.

Food was now the chief concern. We trailed a fishing line behind us, but caught nothing. Brown said there were too many crocodiles for fish to be plentiful, but on the other hand, Kazimoto, who surely should have known, swore that the water was full of big fish, and that the islanders lived on little else. Whatever the truth of it, we caught nothing; and when we reached an island whose sh.o.r.e was lined with fish-traps made of stakes and basket-work we searched all the traps in vain. The natives we saw in the distance all ran away from us, and there were no crops that we could see of any kind, which rather bore out Kazimoto's story.

"Crocks' eggs are what those savages eat, I tell you!" Brown insisted.

"They're wholesome and don't taste worse than a rotten hen's egg." We offered him his own price if he would eat one himself in the presence of us all; but hungry though we were all beginning to be, he refused, and we needed his example.

After that first island we began to sail among a regular archipelago, most of them scarcely better than granite rocks on which the crocodiles could crawl to sun themselves, but some of them a half-mile long, or longer. Nearly all of them were barren, but at last, when we judged ourselves well inside the British portion of the lake, we came on a very large one that had a mountain in the middle of it, and contained a fair-sized village hidden among trees.

It was dark, and we were all famished when we reached it, so when we had poled the dhow into a little bay between granite boulders big enough to hide her, mast and all, we went ash.o.r.e, made fires, and served out the last handfuls of rice, skimping our own allowance to increase those of the porters, whose larger stomachs afforded vaster yearning power. They were pitiably meager rations--a mere jest--an insult to hungry men; but we found before we had cooked and finished them that we had witnesses who thought us fortunate.

They came so silently that even the porters did not notice them at first--gaunt black shadows flitting in the deeper shadows, and coming presently to squat outside the edge of the circle of firelight, until a tribe, men, women and little children, were all gathered around us burning up the darkness with their eyes.

They were hungrier than we! Our food, that looked so scant to us, to them was a very feast of the G.o.ds! They all had pieces of leather or plaited gra.s.s drawn tight around their middles to lessen the pangs of hunger, and the chief, who sat rather apart from the rest, gnawed at a piece of bark.

None of them wore any clothes. Those that had goat-skin ap.r.o.ns had them on behind, and they were as free from self-consciousness as the trees in winter. Some of them had spears, and they all had knives, yet none offered violence, or as much as begged. There were three or four hundred of them, at the lowest reckoning, yet they allowed us to finish our meal in the dark in peace.

There was nothing to say when we had finished. We knew what the matter was, and they knew we knew. We had nothing to share with them, and they knew that, for they could see the empty rice bags that the porters had shaken and beaten to get out the very dust. We did not know their language; even Kazimoto professed himself ignorant of any dozen words that could unlock their understanding.

Presently, under the eyes of all of them, Fred got out the rifle from its wrappings and proceeded to clean and oil it carefully, as every genuine hunter should before he sleeps.

Then it was evident at once that new hope for some reason had been born among that silent crowd. The chief, uninvited, drew nearer and watched every detail of Fred's husbandry with glittering eye.

"Give him the oily rag to suck!" suggested Brown, but that proved not to be the key to his interest, for he thrust the rag back into Fred's hand and motioned to him to continue cleaning.

Finally Fred examined the last handful of cartridges carefully one by one, and filled the magazine. Then, after making sure the sights were in order, he began to wrap the rifle again.

But at that the chief held out a lean long arm and stopped him.

Coutla.s.s sprang to his feet in a hurry, imagining that was a signal to attack at last, but Fred ordered him to sit down, and Lady Waldon, who seemed possessed for the once by uncanny calmness, asked him to give her an arm to the dhow, where she proposed to try to sleep. Coutla.s.s felt flattered, and obeyed. The maid got up and followed them both in a fury of jealousy, and they three were lost to view in a moment among the shadows cast by our four flickering fires. The other Greek got up and followed them, leaving the Goanese already snoozing by the fire.

Then, just as the half of a brilliantly pale moon rose above the papyrus, the chief came a pace nearer and touched Fred's hand. Then he beckoned. Then he touched the hand again and retreated backward.

Glancing around I saw the shadows that were his tribe leaning toward us in strained attention, with eyes for nothing but their chief and Fred.

Understanding there was something that the chief desired him to go and do, Fred pa.s.sed the rifle to Will and rose to his feet.

With patience that was simply pathetic the chief shook his head and tried to explain something in weary-motioned pantomime. Fred took the rifle back from Will. The chief nodded. Fred started to follow him, and then the whole tribe sighed, with a sound like the evening wind rustling through the papyrus.

It being clear now that he was to shoot something, Fred took the wrappings off the rifle, threw them to me, and walked into the dark, the chief trotting ahead like a phantom and glancing back to beckon about once a minute. Not caring to miss the play, we followed in Indian file, I bringing up the rear.