With Edged Tools Part 49

"Yes."

"Then I should be obliged if you would mention the fact that I would rather not be left alone with that blackguard Durnovo, either up at the Platter or travelling down. That man's got on my nerves, sir; and I'm mortal afraid of doing him a injury. He's got a long neck--you've noticed that, perhaps. There was a little Gourkha man up in Cabul taught me a trick--it's as easy as killing a chicken--but you want a man wi' a long neck--just such a neck as Durnovo's."

"But what harm has the man done you," asked Meredith, "that you think so affectionately of his neck?"

"No harm, sir, but we're just like two cats on a wall, watchin' each other and hating each other like blue poison. There's more villainy at that man's back than you think for--mark my words."

Joseph moved towards the door.

"Do you KNOW anything about him--anything shady?" cried Meredith after him.

"No, sir. I don't KNOW anything. But I suspects a whole box full. One of these days I'll find him out, and if I catch him fair there'll be a rough and tumble. It'll be a pretty fight, sir, for them that's sittin'

in the front row."

Joseph rubbed his hands slowly together and departed, leaving his master to begin a long letter to Guy Oscard.

And at the other end of the pa.s.sage, in her room with the door locked, Jocelyn Gordon was sitting, hard-eyed, motionless. She had probably saved the life of Jack Meredith, and in doing so had only succeeded in sending him away from her.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII. DARK DEALING

Only an honest man doing his duty.

When Jack Meredith said that there was not another man in Africa who could make his way from Loango to the Simiacine Plateau he spoke no more than the truth. There were only four men in all the world who knew the way, and two of them were isolated on the summit of a lost mountain in the interior. Meredith himself was unfit for the journey. There remained Joseph.

True, there were several natives who had made the journey, but they were as dumb and driven animals, fighting as they were told, carrying what they were given to carry, walking as many miles as they were considered able to walk. They hired themselves out like animals, and as the beasts of the field they did their work--patiently, without intelligence. Half of them did not know where they were going--what they were doing; the other half did not care. So much work, so much wage, was their terse creed. They neither noted their surroundings nor measured distance.

At the end of their journey they settled down to a life of ease and leisure, which was to last until necessity drove them to work again.

Such is the African. Many of them came from distant countries, a few were Zanzibaris, and went home made men.

If any doubt the inability of such men to steer a course through the wood, let him remember that three months' growth in an African forest will obliterate the track left by the pa.s.sage of an army. If any hold that men are not created so dense and unambitious as has just been represented, let him look nearer home in our own merchant service.

The able-bodied seaman goes to sea all his life, but he never gets any nearer navigating the ship--and he a white man.

In coming down to Loango, Joseph had had the recently-made track of Oscard's rescuing party to guide him day by day. He knew that this was now completely overgrown. The Simiacine Plateau was once more lost to all human knowledge.

And up there--alone amidst the clouds--Guy Oscard was, as he himself tersely put it, "sticking to it." He had stuck to it to such good effect that the supply of fresh young Simiacine was daily increasing in bulk.

Again, Victor Durnovo seemed to have regained his better self. He was like a full-blooded horse--tractable enough if kept hard at work. He was a different man up on the Plateau to what he was down at Loango. There are some men who deteriorate in the wilds, while others are better, stronger, finer creatures away from the luxury of civilisation and the softening influence of female society. Of these latter was Victor Durnovo.

Of one thing Guy Oscard soon became aware, namely, that no one could make the men work as could Durnovo. He had merely to walk to the door of his tent to make every picker on the little Plateau bend over his tree with renewed attention. And while above all was eagerness and hurry, below, in the valley, this man's name insured peace.

The trees were now beginning to show the good result of pruning and a regular irrigation. Never had the leaves been so vigorous, never had the Simiacine trees borne such a bushy, luxuriant growth since the dim dark days of the Flood.

Oscard relapsed into his old hunting ways. Day after day he tranquilly shouldered his rifle, and alone, or followed by one attendant only, he disappeared into the forest, only to emerge therefrom at sunset. What he saw there he never spoke of. Sure it was that he must have seen strange things, for no prying white man had set foot in these wilds before him; no book has ever been written of that country that lies around the Simiacine Plateau.

He was not the man to worry himself over uncertainties. He had an enormous faith in the natural toughness of an Englishman, and while he crawled breathlessly in the track of the forest monsters he hardly gave a thought to Jack Meredith. Meredith, he argued to himself, had always risen to the occasion: why should he not rise to this? He was not the sort of man to die from want of staying power, which, after all, is the cause of more deaths than we dream of. And when he had recovered he would either return or send back Joseph with a letter containing those suggestions of his which were really orders.

Of Millicent Chyne he thought more often, with a certain tranquil sense of a good time to come. In her also he placed a perfect faith. A poet has found out that, if one places faith in a man, it is probable that the man will rise to trustworthiness--of woman he says nothing. But of these things Guy Oscard knew little. He went his own tranquilly strong way, content to buy his own experience.

He was thinking of Millicent Chyne one misty morning while he walked slowly backwards and forwards before his tent. His knowledge of the country told him that the mist was nothing but the night's acc.u.mulation of moisture round the summit of the mountain--that down in the valleys it was clear, and that half an hour's sunshine would disperse all. He was waiting for this result when he heard a rifle-shot far away in the haze beneath him; and he knew that it was Joseph--probably making one of those marvellous long shots of his which roused a sudden sigh of envy in the heart of this mighty hunter whenever he witnessed them.

Oscard immediately went to his tent and came out with his short-barrelled, evil-looking rifle on his arm. He fired both barrels in quick succession and waited, standing gravely on the edge of the Plateau. After a short silence two answering reports rose up through the mist to his straining ears.

He turned and found Victor Durnovo standing at his side.

"What is that?" asked the half-breed.

"It must be Joseph," answered Guy, "or Meredith. It can be n.o.body else."

"Let us hope that it is Meredith," said Durnovo with a forced laugh, "but I doubt it."

Oscard looked down in his sallow, powerful face. He was not quick at such things, but at that moment he felt strangely certain that Victor Durnovo was hoping that Meredith was dead.

"I hope it isn't," he answered, and without another word he strode away down the little pathway from the summit into the clouds, loading his rifle as he went.

Durnovo and his men, working among the Simiacine bushes, heard from time to time a signal shot as the two Englishmen groped their way towards each other through the everlasting night of the African forest.

It was midday before the new-comers were espied making their way painfully up the slope, and Joseph's welcome was not so much in Durnovo's handshake, in Guy Oscard's silent approval, as in the row of grinning, good-natured black faces behind Durnovo's back.

That night laughter was heard in the men's camp for the first time for many weeks--nay, several months. According to the account that Joseph gave to his dusky admirers, he had been on terms of the closest familiarity with the wives, and families of all who had such at Loango or on the Coast. He knew the mother of one, had met the sweetheart of another, and confessed that it was only due to the fact that he was not "a marryin' man" that he had not stayed at Loango for the rest of his life. It was somewhat singular that he had nothing but good news to give.

Durnovo heard the clatter of tongues, and Guy Oscard, smoking his contemplative pipe in a camp-chair before his hut door, noticed that the sound did not seem very welcome.

Joseph's arrival with ten new men seemed to give a fresh zest to the work, and the carefully-packed cases of Simiacine began to fill Oscard's tent to some inconvenience. Thus things went on for two tranquil weeks.

"First," Oscard had said, "let us get the crop in and then we can arrange what is to be done about the future."

So the crop received due attention; but the two leaders of the men--he who led by fear and he who commanded by love--were watching each other.

One evening, when the work was done, Oscard's meditations were disturbed by the sound of angry voices behind the native camp. He turned naturally towards Durnovo's tent, and saw that he was absent. The voices rose and fell: there was a singular accompanying roar of sound which Oscard never remembered having heard before. It was the protesting voice of a ma.s.s of men--and there is no sound like it--none so disquieting. Oscard listened attentively, and suddenly he was thrown up on his feet by a pistol-shot.

At the same moment Joseph emerged from behind the tents, dragging some one by the collar. The victim of Joseph's violence was off his feet, but still struggling and kicking.

Guy Oscard saw the flash of a second shot, apparently within a few inches of Joseph's face; but he came on, dragging the man with him, whom from his clothing Oscard saw to be Durnovo.

Joseph was spitting out wadding and burnt powder.

"Shoot ME, would yer--yer d.a.m.ned skulking chocolate-bird? I'll teach you! I'll twist that brown neck of yours."

He shook him as a terrier shakes a rat, and seemed to shake things off him--among others a revolver which described a circle in the air and fell heavily on the ground, where the concussion discharged a cartridge.

"'Ere, sir," cried Joseph, literally throwing Durnovo down on the ground at Oscard's feet, "that man has just shot one o' them poor n.i.g.g.e.rs, so 'elp me G.o.d!"

Durnovo rose slowly to his feet, as if the shaking had disturbed his faculties.

"And the man hadn't done 'im no harm at all. He's got a grudge against him. I've seen that this last week and more. It's a man as was kinder fond o' me, and we understood each other's lingo. That's it--he was afraid of my 'earing things that mightn't be wholesome for me to know.

The man hadn't done no harm. And Durnovo comes up and begins abusing 'im, and then he strikes 'im, and then he out with his revolver and shoots 'im down."