The Ivory Trail by Talbot Mundy (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

the others were absent, even the native boy who brought them—not daring to enter our camp, but fastening the message to a stone and throwing it in through the tent door.

They were strange, illiterate messages, childishly conceived, varying between straight-out offers to help us escape and dark insinuations that he knew of something it would pay us well to investigate.

It was an English missionary spending three days in Muanza on his way to Lake Tanganika, who came to see what he could do for my wound and cleared up the mystery quite a little by reporting what he had heard in the non-commissioned mess, where he had been invited to eat a meal.

"The Greek," he said, "is trying to curry favor by pretending he knows your plans. If he succeeds in worming into your confidence and persuading you to make plans to escape with him, they will feel justified in putting you in jail—and that, I understand, is where they want you."

"Will you do me a favor?" I asked.

He hesitated. It was kindness that had sent him down to ease my pain, if possible, not anti-Germanism; it was part of German policy to pose as the friend of all missionaries, and if anything he was prejudiced against us—particularly against Brown, whom he had visited in jail, and who assured him the only hymn he ever sang was "Beer, glorious beer!"

"That depends," he answered.

"We are quite sure any letters we write will be opened," I said.

He answered that he could hardly believe that.

"If we could send a letter unopened to British East it would solve our worst problem," I told him. "If you know of a dependable messenger who would carry our letter, I would contribute fifty pounds out of my own pocket to the funds of your mission."

I made a mistake there, and realized it the next moment.

"What kind of letter is worth fifty pounds?" he asked me. "Isn't it something illegal that you fear might get you into worse trouble if opened and read?"

I argued in vain, and only made my case worse by citing as an instance of German official turpitude the staff surgeon's neglect of me.

"But he tells me you refuse to be treated by him!" he answered. "He says you enter his hospital and are insolent if he happens to be too busy to attend to you at once. He says you refuse to let a native orderly dress your wound!"

He had been entertained to one meal at the commandant's house on the hill, and regaled by awful accounts of our ferocity. I did not succeed in inserting as much as the thin end of a different view until he asked me how a man's name could be professor Schillingschen and his wife's Lady Isobel Saffren Waldon.

"I don't understand about titles," he said. "Shouldn't she take his name, or else he hers, or something?"

I assured him that marriage had never as much as entered the head of either of them.

"They're simply living together," I said. "He's a cynical brute. She's a designing female!"

The missionary mind recoiled and refused to believe me. But after he had thought the matter over and seen the probability, he swung over to a sort of lame admission that a few more of my statements might perhaps be true.

"I will take your letter and guarantee its delivery in British East, provided I may read it and do not disapprove of its contents." he volunteered.

"That's not unreasonable," I said, "but the letter is in code."

"I should have to see it decoded."

I told him to find Fred and Will. He came on them sitting smoking under the great rock near the waterfront that had been inset with a bronze medallion of Bismarck, and startled them almost into committing an assault on him, by saying that he wanted our secret code at once. They had been trying to get tobacco to Brown, and sweetmeats to Kazimoto, had failed in both efforts and were short-tempered. He explained after they had insulted him sufficiently, and they walked down to the camp one on either hand, apologizing all the way. I imagine they had criticized missions of all denominations pretty thoroughly.

In the end he decided not to read the letter at all.

"I have reached the conclusion you three men are gentlemen," he said, "and would not take advantage of me. I will take your letter to Ujiji, and send it to the south end of Lake Tanganika, to be put in the British mail bag for Mombasa by way of Durban. It will take a long time to reach its destination—perhaps two months; but I will have it registered, and it will undoubtedly get there."

That he kept his word and better we had ample proof later on, but I did not bless him particularly fervidly at the time, for he went straight to the doctor and repeated my complaints. He left for Ujiji the next day, and the net result of his friendly interference was that the doctor refused me any sort of attention at all—even a change of bandages.

Fred and Will did their best for me, but it was little. I read in their faces, and in their studied cheerfulness when speaking in my presence, that they had made up their minds I was going to lose the number of my mess. They went to the commandant and the lieutenant besides the doctor in efforts to secure for me some sort of consideration, but without result; and they wrote at least six letters to the British East African Protectorate government that we ascertained afterward never reached their destination. They tried to register one letter, but registration was refused.

"Why don't they jail us simply, and have done with it?"—Will kept wondering aloud.

"They will when it suits their books," said I. "For the present they scarcely dare. Word might reach the British government. They're breaking no international law by holding us here and keeping tabs on us."

Before many days I grew unable to leave the hard cork mattress on the camp-bed in Fred's tent. They went again to the commandant, this time determined to force the issue.

"I will send some one," he told them, and they came away delighted that strong language should succeed where politeness formerly had failed.

But all the commandant did send was an askari twice a day, to lean on his rifle in the tent door, leer at me, and march away again.

"He comes to see if I'm dead," said I. "It would be inconvenient to have me die in jail; there might be inquiries afterward from British East. After I'm dead and buried they'll jail you two healthy ones, and keep you until you 'blab'!"

"Why don't we straight out tell 'em we don't know a thing about the ivory?" wondered Will.

"Because they wouldn't believe us!" Fred answered.

Seven days after the sentry's first call the doctor took to coming in person to look at me. He never except once stepped inside the tent, but was satisfied to give me a glance of contempt and go away again, once or twice taking pains to inspect the Greeks' camp before leaving. He usually had Schubert trailing in his wake, and gave him stern orders about sanitation which nobody ever carried out. The sanitary conditions of that rest-camp were simply non-existent until we came there, and we had gone to no pains on the Greeks' account.

But the Greeks did us an unexpected good turn, though it looked like making more trouble for us at the time. They began to complain of lack of exercise, and to grow actually sick for want of it. Because of that, and jealousy, they raised a clamor about our freedom to go anywhere within township limits as against their strict confinement to the camp. The commandant came down to the camp in person to hear what they had to say, and being in a good humor saw fit to yield a point. Being a military German, though, he could not do it without attaching ignominious conditions.

There was a band attached to the local company of Sudanese—an affair consisting of four native war-drums and two fifes. They knew eight bars of one tune, and were proud of it, the fifers blowing with beef and pluck and the drummers thundering native fashion, which means that the only difference between their noise and a thunder-storm was in the tempo.

Day after day, twice a day, whether it rained or shone, it seemed to be the law that this "band" should patrol the whole township limits, playing its only tune, lifting the tops of men's heads with its infernal drumming, and delighting nobody except the players and the township urchins, who marched in its wake rejoicing.

The Greeks and the Goanese were given leave to march with the band twice a day for the sake of exercise. They refused indignantly. The commandant flew into the rage that is the birthright of all German officials, but suddenly checked himself; he had a brilliant idea.

He withdrew the permission and changed it to an order that Coutlass and his two friends should march with the band twice daily for the sake of their health, on pain of imprisonment should they refuse.

"And I will prove to you," he said, "that the good German rule is impartial. All aliens awaiting trial and confined within the township limits shall march with the band if they are able!" As an afterthought he added magnanimously: "Those in the jail, too, provided they have not been sentenced for serious crimes!"

So Coutlass, his Greek friend, the Goanese, Fred, Will, and Brown of Lumbwa marched about the town twice daily, at seven in the morning and three in the afternoon, a journey of five miles, Fred and Will making no objection because it gave them a chance to talk with Brown. There were strict orders against talking, and four askaris armed with rifles marched behind to enforce the rule as well as keep guard over Brown. But the drums were so thunderous and the shrill fifes so lusty that the askaris could not hear conversation pitched in low tones.

"Brown says," said Fred, returning from the first march, "that he sleeps with only a sheet of corrugated iron between him and the ward where the chain-gang lies. He can talk with Kazimoto when he happens to be at that end of the chain. They've nothing but planks to lie on, any of them. He says Kazimoto seems determined to kill the lieutenant who sentenced him, and as soon as he's off the chain we'd better grab him and hurry him out of the country."

"Six months!" said I. "Splendid advice! How many of us will be alive or at liberty six months from now? Not I, at any rate!"

"How d'you suppose they discipline the chain-gang?" Fred asked, ignoring my growing hopelessness.

"With the lash," said I. "I've seen!"

"That's by day," said Fred. "They've better ways at night. One plan is no supper or breakfast; but the champion scheme is the doctor's. On complaint by the askaris that a man on the chain has shirked his work, or answered back, or been obstreperous, the doctor serves him out a handful of strong pills and sees him swallow them. They don't unchain them at night. D'you get the idea?"

"Not yet."

"Every time the man has to go outside he must wake the whole gang and take them with him! They're weary after working twelve hours at a stretch. After the second or third time up they begin to object pretty strenuously. After the third or fourth time he's so unpopular that he'd almost rather die than wake them. Imagine the result, and what he suffers!"

Despondency began to have hold of me, and I no longer wished to live. The doctor's momentary daily visits increased my loathing for the crew who tyrannized there in the name of Progress, and I could see no way of retaliating. I became seized with a sort of delirious conviction that if only I could die and be out of the way my friends would be far better able to contrive without me. There is no convalescence in a mood of that sort, and each morning found me nearer death than the last. Then malaria developed, to give me the finishing touch, and although