CHAPTER XIII

IN THE FOREST

In the K’hassi backland three men sat at chop. The sun was going down, and a log fire such as the native will build on the hottest day sent up a thin straight whisp of smoke.

The stout man in the soiled ducks was Lambaire, the thin man with the yellow unshaven face was Whitey. He was recovering from his second attack of fever, and the hand that he raised to his mouth shook suggestively. Young Sutton was a sulky third.

They did not speak as they disposed of the unpalatable river fish which their headman had caught for them. Not until they had finished and had strolled down to the edge of the river, did they break the silence.

“This is the end of it,” said Lambaire thickly.

Whitey said nothing.

“Three thousand pounds this expedition has cost, and I don’t know how many years of my life,” Lambaire continued, “and we’re a thousand miles from the coast.”

“Four hundred,” interrupted Whitey impatiently, “and it might as well be four thousand.”

There was a long pause in the conversation.

“Where does this river lead to?” asked Lambaire; “it must go somewhere.”

“It goes through a fine cannibal country,” said Whitey grimly; “if you’re thinking of a short cut to the sea leave out the river.”

“And there’s no River of Stars--no diamonds: a cursed fine explorer that father of yours, Sutton.” He said this savagely, but the boy with his head on his knees, looking wistfully at the river, made no reply.

“A cursed fine explorer,” repeated Lambaire.

Sutton half turned his head. “Don’t quarrel with me,” he said drearily, “because if you do----”

“Hey! if I do?” Lambaire was ripe for quarrelling with anybody.

“If you do, I’ll shoot you dead,” said the boy, and turned his head again in the direction of the river.

Lambaire’s face twitched and he half rose--they were sitting on the river bank. “None o’ that talk, none o’ that talk, Sutton,” he growled tremulously; “that’s not the sort o’----”

“Oh, shut up!” snarled Whitey, “we don’t want your jabber, Lambaire--we want a way out!”

A way out! This is what the search for the river had come to: this was the end of four months’ wandering, every day taking them farther and farther into the bush; every week snapped one link that held them to civilization. They had not reached the Portuguese border, because, long before they had arrived within a hundred miles of the frontier, it was apparent that the map was all wrong. There had been little villages marked upon it which they had not come by: once when a village had been traced, and a tribal headquarters located, they had discovered, as other African travellers had discovered, that a score of villages bearing the same name might be found within a radius of a hundred miles.

And all the time the little party, with its rapidly diminishing band of carriers, was getting farther and farther into the bush. They had parleyed with the Alebi folk, fought a running fight with the bush people of the middle forest, held their camp against a three-day attack of the painted K’hassi, and had reached the dubious security which the broken-spirited slave people of the Inner Lands could offer.

And the end of it was that the expedition must turn back, passing through the outraged territories they had forced.

“There is no other way,” persisted Lambaire. Whitey shook his head.

A singularly futile ending to a great expedition. I am following the train of thought in Sutton’s mind as he gloomed at the river flowing slowly past. Not the way which such expeditions ended in books. Cynthia would laugh, he shuddered. Perhaps she would cry, and have cause, moreover.

And that thief man, Amber; a rum name, Amber--gold, diamonds. No diamonds, no River of Stars: the dream had faded. This was a river. It slugged a way through a cannibal land, it passed over hundreds of miles of cataracts and came to the sea ... where there were ships that carried one to England ... to London.

He sprang up. “When shall we start?” he asked dully.

“Start?” Lambaire looked up.

“We’ve got to go back the way we came,” said the boy. “We might as well make a start now--the carriers are going--two went last night. We’ve no white man’s food; we’ve about a hundred rounds of ammunition apiece.”

“I suppose we can start to-morrow,” he said listlessly.

* * * * *

Before the sun came up, a little expedition began its weary march coastward.

For three days they moved without opposition; on the fourth day they came upon a hunting regiment of the K’hassi--an ominous portent, for they had hoped to get through the K’hassi country without any serious fighting. The hunting regiment abandoned its search for elephant and took upon itself the more joyous task of hunting men.

Fortunately the little party struck the open plain which lies to the westward of the K’hassi land proper, and in the open they held the enemy at bay. On the fifth day their headman, marching at the rear of the sweating carriers, suddenly burst into wild and discordant song. Sutton and Whitey went back to discover the reason for the outburst, and the man with a chuckle told them that he had seen several devils. That night the headman took a billet of wood, and creeping stealthily upon a carrier with whom he had been on perfectly friendly terms, smashed his skull.

“It is sleeping sickness,” said Sutton.

The three white men were gathered near the tree to which the mad headman was bound--not without a few minor casualties among the carriers.

“What can we do?” fretted Lambaire. “We can’t leave him--he would starve, or he might get free--that’s worse.”

Eventually they let the problem stand over till the morning, setting a guard to watch the lunatic.

The carriers were assembled in the morning under a new headman, and the caravan marched, Whitey remaining behind. Lambaire, marching in the centre of the column, heard the sharp explosion of a revolver, and then after a pause another. He shuddered and wiped his moist forehead with the back of his hand.

Soon Whitey caught up with the party--Whitey, pallid of face, with his mouth trembling.

Lambaire looked at him fearfully.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

“Go on, go on,” snarled the other. “You are too questioning, Lambaire; you are too prying--you know damn’d well what I have done. Can’t leave a nigger to starve to death--hey? Got to do something?” His voice rose to a shrill scream, and Lambaire, shaking his head helplessly, asked no more.

In romances your rascal is so thorough paced a rascal that no good may be said of him, no meritorious achievement can stand to his credit. In real life great villains can be heroic. Lambaire was naturally a coward--he was all the greater hero that he endured the rigours of that march and faced the dangers which every new day brought forth, uncomplainingly.

They had entered the Alebi country on the last long stage of the journey, when the great thought came to Lambaire. He confided to nobody, but allowed the matter to turn over in his mind two whole days.

They came upon a native village, the inhabitants of which were friendly disposed to the strange white men, and here they rested their weary bodies for the space of three days.

On the evening of the second day, as they sat before a blazing fire--for the night air had a nip even in equatorial Africa--Lambaire spoke his mind.

“Does it occur to you fellows what we are marching towards?” he asked.

Neither answered him. Sutton took a listless interest in the conversation, but the eyes of Whitey narrowed watchfully.

“We are marching to the devil,” said Lambaire impressively. “I am marching to the bankruptcy court, and so are you, Whitey. Sutton is marching to something that will make him the laughing-stock of London; and,” he added slowly, watching the effect of his words, “that will make his father’s name ridiculous.”

He saw the boy wince, and went on:

“Me and Whitey floated a Company--got money out of the public--diamond mine--brilliant prospects and all that sort of thing--see?”

He caught Whitey nodding his head thoughtfully, and saw the puzzled interest in Sutton’s face.

“We are going back----”

“If we get back,” murmured Whitey.

“Don’t talk like a fool,” snapped Lambaire. “My God, you make me sick, Whitey; you spoil everything! Get back! Of course we will get back--the worst of the fighting is over. It’s marchin’ now--we are in reach of civilization----”

“Go on--go on,” said Whitey impatiently, “when we get back?”

“When we do,” said Lambaire, “we’ve got to say, ‘Look here, you people--the fact of it is----’”

“Making a clean breast of the matter,” murmured Whitey.

“Making a clean breast of the matter--‘there’s no mine.’”

Lambaire paused, as much to allow the significance of the situation to sink into his own mind as into the minds of the hearers.

“Well?” asked Whitey.

“Well,” repeated the other, “why should we? Look here!”--he leant forward and spoke rapidly and with great earnestness--“what’s to prevent our saying that we have located the diamond patch, eh? We can cut out the river--make it a dried river bed--we have seen hundreds of places where there are rivers in the wet season. Suppose we get back safe and sound with our pockets full of garnets and uncut diamonds--I can get ’em in London----”

Whitey’s eyes were dancing now; no need to ask him how the ingenious plan appealed to him. But Sutton questioned.

The young man’s face was stiff with resentment. “You are mad, Lambaire,” he said roughly. “Do you think that I would go back and lie? Do you imagine that I would be a party to a fraud of that kind--and lend my father’s name and memory to it? You are mad.”

Neither man had regarded him as a serious factor in the expedition and its object. They did not look for opposition from one whom they had regarded more or less as a creature. Yet such opposition they had to meet, opposition that grew in strength with every argument they addressed to him.

Men who find themselves out of touch with civilization are apt to take perverted moral views, and before they had left the friendly village both Whitey--the saner of the pair--and Lambaire had come to regard themselves as ill-used men.

Sutton’s ridiculous scruples stood between them and fortunes; this crank by his obstinacy prevented their reaping the reward of their industry. At the end of a week--a week unrelieved by the appearance of a danger which might have shaken them to a clarity of thought--Sutton was outcast. Worse than that, for him, he developed a malignant form of malaria, and the party came to a halt in a big clearing of the forest. Here, near a dried watercourse, they pitched their little camp, being induced to the choice by the fact that water was procurable a few feet below the surface.

Lambaire and Whitey went for a walk in the forest. Neither of them spoke, they each knew the mind of the other.

“Well?” said Whitey at last.

Lambaire avoided his eye.

“It means ruin for us--and there’s safety and a fortune if he’d be sensible.”

Again a long silence.

“Is he bad?” asked Lambaire suddenly, and the other shrugged his shoulders.

“No worse than I’ve been half a dozen times. It’s his first attack of fever.”

There was another long pause, broken by Whitey.

“We can’t carry him--we’ve got two carriers, and there’s another fifty miles to go before we reach a mission station--so the carriers say.”

They walked aimlessly up and down, each man intent on his own thoughts. They spoke no more, but returned to their little camp, where a semi-delirious youth moaned and fretted querulously, talking in the main to himself.

Lambaire stood by him, looking down at the restless figure; then he went in search of Whitey.

“This thing has got to be done regularly,” he said, and produced a note-book. “I trust you, Whitey, and you trust me--but we will have it down in black and white.”

The two memorandums were drawn up in identical terms. Whitey demurred, but signed....

Before the accustomed hour, Whitey woke the coast boy who acted as interpreter and was one of the two remaining carriers.

“Get up,” he said gruffly; “get them guns on your head and move quickly.”

The native rose sleepily. The fire was nearly out, and he gave it a kick with his bare foot to rouse it to flame.

“None of that,” fumed Whitey--he was in an unusual mood. “Get the other man, and trek.”

The little party went silently along the dark forest path, the native leading the way with a lantern as protection against possible attacks from wild beasts.

He stopped of a sudden and turned to Lambaire, who shuffled along in his rear.

“Dem young massa, I no lookum.”

“Go on,” said Whitey gruffly. “Dem massa he die one time.”

The native grunted and continued his way. Death in this land, where men rise up hale in the morning and are buried in sunset, was not a great matter.

They halted at daybreak to eat the meal which was usually partaken of before marching.

The two white men ate in silence--neither looking at the other.

Not until the forest was flooded with the rising sunlight did Whitey make any reference to the events of the night.

“We couldn’t leave a nigger behind to starve--and I am cursed if we haven’t left a white man,” he said, and swore horribly.

“Don’t do it--don’t say it,” implored Lambaire, raising his big hand in protest; “we couldn’t--we couldn’t do what we did ... you know ... what we did to the madman.... Be sensible, Whitey ... he’s dead.”

Three days later they reached an outlying mission station, and a heliograph message carried the news of their arrival to a wandering district commissioner, who was “working” a country so flat that heliographic communication was not possible with the coast.

But he had a basket full of carrier pigeons.

* * * * *

Three weeks’ rest, soft beds to lie upon, Christian food to eat, and the use of a razor, make all the difference in the world to men of Lambaire’s type. He had a convenient memory. He forgot things easily. There came to the mission station a small keen-faced man in khaki, the redoubtable Commissioner Sanders, who asked questions, but in view of the debilitated condition of the mission guests did not press for information. He heard without surprise that the River of Stars had been discovered,--he gathered from the vague description the men gave him of the locality where the discovery had been made that the new diamond field was in British territory--he was disappointed but did not show it.

For no man charged with the well-being of native peoples welcomes the discovery of precious stones or metal in his dominion. Such wealth means wars and the upheaval of new forces. It means the end of a regular condition, and the super-imposition of a hasty civilization.

There have been critics who asked why the Commissioner then and there did not demand a view of the specimens that Lambaire and his confederate brought from the mythical mine. But Sanders, as I have explained elsewhere, was a simple man who had never been troubled with the administration of a mineralized region, and frankly had no knowledge as to what a man ought to do in the circumstances.

“When did Sutton die?” he asked, and they told him.

“Where?”

Here they were at fault, for the spot indicated was a hundred miles inland.

Sanders made a rapid calculation.

“It must be nearer than that,” he said. “You could not have marched to the mission station in the time.”

They admitted possibility of error and Sanders accepted the admission, having some experience in the unreliability of starved men’s memory.

He questioned the carriers, and they were no more explicit.

“Master,” said the headman, speaking in the riverian dialect, “it was at a place where there are four trees all growing together, two being of camwood and one of copal.”

Since the forests of the Alebi are mainly composed of camwood and gum, the Commissioner was no wiser.

A fortnight after this conversation, Lambaire and Whitey reached the little coast town where Sanders had his headquarters.