THE MAN HUNTERS.
For some three hours the party moves forward through the forest shades.
Then a halt is called, and, sentinels having been posted, soon the smoke
of bivouac fires ascends, and the clatter of cooking utensils mingles
with the hum of many voices.
The place selected is an open glade or clearing, overhung on one side by
hoary masses of rock. The slave-hunters, as we have said, are divided
into two sections, one consisting of negroid Arabs and Wa-Swahili,
believers in the Prophet mostly, and clad in array once gaudy but now
soiled and tarnished, some few, however, wearing the white haik and
burnous; the other of Wangoni, stalwart, martial savages, believers in
nothing and clad in not much more. These form camps apart, for at heart
each section despises the other, though for purposes of self-interest
temporarily welded. A few, but very few, are Arabs of pure blood.
One of these is now engaged in converse with the leader of the party. He
is a tall, dignified, keen-faced man, with eyes as piercing as those of
a hawk, and his speech is sparing. But if his words are few his deeds
are many, and the name of Lutali--which, however, he makes no secret is
not his real name--is known and feared at least as far and as
thoroughly as that of the chief of the slavers himself.
For the latter, one glance at him is sufficient to show that if ever man
was born to rule with firm but judicious hand such a gang of
bloodthirsty freebooters it is this one. The vigour of his powerful
frame is apparent with every movement, and the strength and fixity of
will expressed in his keen dark face there is no mistaking. But the
black, piercing eyes and bronzed features belong to no Arab, no half
caste. He is a white man, a European.
Stay! To be accurate, there is just a strain of Arab in him; faint,
indeed, as of several generations intervening, yet real enough to
qualify him for mysterious rites of blood brotherhood with some of the
most powerful chiefs from Tanganyika to Khartoum. And throughout the
Congo territory, and many an equatorial tribe beyond, this man's name
has been known and feared. No leader of slave-hunters can come near him
for bold and wide-sweeping raids, the terror and unexpectedness of
which, together with the complete and ruthless fixity of purpose
wherewith the objects of them, however strong, however alert, are struck
and promptly subjugated, have gained for him among his followers and
allies the sobriquet of El Khanac, "The Strangler." But the
reader--together with Johannesburg at large--knows him under another
name, and that is "Pirate" Hazon.
"Is it prudent, think you, Lutali?" he is saying. "Consider. These
Wajalu are a trifle too near the land of the Ba-gcatya. Indeed, we
ourselves are too near it now, and a day's journey or more in the same
direction is it not to run our heads into the jaws of the lion?"
"Allah is great, my brother," replies the Arab, with a shrug of the
shoulders. "But I would ask, what have we, in our numbers and with arms
such as these," gripping significantly his Express rifle, "to fear from
those devil-worshippers armed with spears and shields--yea, even the
whole nation of them?"
"Yet I have seen an army of the nation of which those
'devil-worshippers' are sprung, armed only with spears and shields, eat
up a force three times as large as our own and infinitely better armed,
I being one of the few who escaped. And 'The People of the Spider'
cannot, from all accounts, be inferior to the stock whence they came."
Lutali shrugs his shoulders again.
"It may be so," he says, "yet there is a large village of these Wajalu
which would prove an easy capture and would complete the number we
need."
"Then let us chance it," is Hazon's rejoinder.
The Arab makes a murmur of assent and stalks away to his own people,
while Hazon returns to where he has left his white colleague.
"Well, Holmes, according to Lutali, they are bent on risking it," he
begins, throwing himself upon a rug and proceeding to fill a pipe.
"Are they? I'm not altogether glad, yet if it tends towards hurrying us
out of this butchery line of business I'm not altogether sorry. I think
I hate it more and more every day."
"It isn't a bad line of business, Holmes," returns Hazon, completely
ignoring the smothered reproachfulness, resentment even, underlying the
tone and reply. "Come, now, you've made a goodish bit of money the short
time you have been at it. Anyhow, I want to know in what other you would
have made anything like as much in the time. Not in fooling with those
rotten swindling stocks at the Rand, for instance?"
"Maybe not. But we haven't realized yet. In other words, we are not safe
out of the wood yet, Hazon, and so it's too soon to hulloa. I don't
believe we are going to get off so easily," he adds.
"Are you going to get on your croaking horse again, and threaten us with
'judgments' and 'curses,' and all that sort of thing?" rejoins the
other, with a good-humoured laugh. "Why, man, we are
philanthropists--real philanthropists. And I never heard of 'judgments'
and 'curses' being showered upon such."
"Philanthropists, are we? That's a good idea. But where, by the way,
does the philanthropy come in?"
"Why, just here." Then, impressively, "Listen, now, Holmes. Carry your
mind back to all the sights you have seen since we came up the Lualaba
until now. Have you forgotten that round dozen of niggers we happened
on, buried in the ground up to their necks, and when we had dug up one
fellow we found we had taken a lot of trouble for nothing because he'd
got his arms and legs broken. The same held good of all the others,
except that some were mutilated as well. You remember how sick it made
you coming upon those heads in the half darkness; or those quarters of
a human body swinging from branches, to which their owner had been
spliced so that, in springing back, the boughs should drag him asunder,
as in fact they did? Or the sight of people feeding on the flesh of
their own blood relations, and many and many another spectacle no more
amusing? Well, then, these barbarities were practised by no wicked
slave-raiders, mind, but by the 'quiet, harmless' people upon each
other. And they are of every-day occurrence. Well, then, in capturing
these gentle souls, and deporting them--for a price--whither they will
perforce be taught better manners, we are acting the part of real
philanthropists. Do you catch on?"
"What of those we kill? Those Wangoni brutes are never happy unless
killing."
"That is inevitable and is the law of life, which is always hard. And,
as Lutali would say, who may fight against his destiny? Not that I mean
to say we embarked in this business from motives of philanthropy, friend
Holmes; I only cite the argument as one to quiet that singularly
inconvenient conscience of yours. We did so, Stanninghame and I, at any
rate, to make money--quickly, and plenty of it; and I'm not sure
Stanninghame doesn't need it more than you and I put together."
"By-the-by, I wonder what on earth has become of Stanninghame all this
time?" said Holmes, apparently glad to quit an unprofitable subject.
"So do I. He ought to have joined us by now. He is just a trifle
foolhardy, is Stanninghame, in knocking about so far afield alone," and
a shade of anxiety steals over the speaker's face.
Holmes makes no reply, and for a while lies back on his rug, puffing
away at his pipe and busy with his thoughts. These are not altogether
pleasant. The process which had transformed the fine, open-natured,
wholesome-hearted young Englishman into a slave-hunter, the confederate
of ruthless cut-throats and desperadoes, had, in truth, been such as to
engender the reverse of pleasant thoughts. Yet, that he had come to this
was rather the fault of circumstances than the fault of Holmes. He had
enjoyed the big game shooting and the ivory trading of the earlier stage
of the trip, the more so from the consciousness that there was profit in
both; and when a large caravan of the above and other legitimate
merchandise had been run down to the coast, he had steadfastly refused
to take the opportunity of parting company with the others. Then when
they had pushed farther into the equatorial regions, and, joining with
Lutali, had embarked on their present enterprise, all opportunity of
withdrawing had gone. The precise point at which he had cast in his lot
with this, Holmes could not with certainty define. Yet there were times
when he thought he could. He had relieved his conscience with indignant,
passionate protest, when first his eyes became fairly opened to the real
nature of the enterprise; and then had supervened that terrible bout of
malarial fever, his tardy recovery from which he owed entirely to the
care and nursing of both Hazon and Stanninghame. But it left him for a
long time weakened in mind and will no less than in body, and what could
he do but succumb to the inevitable? Yet he had never entered into the
sinister undertaking with the whole-heartedness of his two
conscienceless confederates, and of this the latter were aware.
However, of his scruples they were tolerant enough. He was brimful of
pluck, and seemed to enjoy the situation when they were attacked by
overwhelming odds and had to fight hard and fiercely, such as befell
more than once. And they would insidiously lay salve to his misgivings
by such arguments as we have just heard Hazon adduce, or by reminding
him of the fortune they were making, or even of the physical advantage
he was deriving from the trip.
The latter, indeed, was a fact. The life in the open, the varying
climates, frequent and inevitable hardships and never-absent peril, had
made their mark upon Holmes. Once recovered from his attack, he began to
put on flesh and muscle, and his eyes were clear and bright with that
keen alertness which is the result of peril as a constant companion. In
short, as they said, he looked twice the man he had done when lounging
around the Stock Exchange or the liquor bars of Johannesburg.
Through the hot hours of noontide the raiders lie at their ease. Many
are asleep, others conversing in drowsy tones, smoking or chewing
tobacco. The Wangoni divide their time about equally between taking
snuff and jeering at and teasing the unfortunate captives. These,
crouching on the ground, relieved during the halt of their heavy forked
yokes, endure it all with the stoicism of the most practical phase of
humanity--the savage. No good is to be got out of bewailing their lot,
therefore they do not bewail it; moreover, belonging to a savage race,
and far from the highest type of the same, they have no thought of the
future, and are thus spared the discomfort and anxiety of speculating as
to what it may contain for them. Indeed, their chief anxiety at this
moment is that of food, of which they would fain have more, and gaze
with wistful eyes upon their captors, who are feasting on the remnant of
what was until lately their own property. But the latter jeeringly
suggest to them the expediency of their devouring each other, since they
seem to have a preference for such diet.
Then, as the sun's rays abate somewhat in fierceness, the temporary camp
is struck. Bearers take up their loads, fighters look to their arms, the
soiled and gaudy finery of the semi-civilized sons of the Prophet
contrasting with the shining skins of the naked Wangoni, even as the
Winchester and Snider rifles and great sheath-knives and revolvers of
the first do with the broad spears and tufted hide shields of the
latter. And with the files of dejected-looking slaves, yoked together in
their heavy wooden forks, or chained only, the whole caravan, numbering
now some six hundred souls, moves onward.
But in the mind of the principal of the two white leaders, as he traces
a cipher on the scene of their recent halt, and in that of the other,
who watches him, is present, now with deepening anxiety, the same
thought, the same speculation: What has become of the third?