It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on his bald head.
His burly, masculine figure seemed incongruous among the welter of empty deck-chairs and the futile debris of a voyage—women's wraps, rope quoits, cushions and picture papers. Side by side we leant over the rail, and for a while our tongues were busy with the idiocies that pass for events on a liner—the ship's run, the latest quarrel, and so forth. A pause gave me the opportunity to remind him that he was in the middle of a story.
"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked, surprised. I said that I was interested to know what happened, resisting the temptation to add that I could spare some of the moralising with which he garnished his facts.
"About the hour," he began again, "that Norah received the note, Dick was finishing a second helping of roan antelope by the side of the fire he had described.
'So I followed for hours,' he was saying, 'till the path stopped dead at a drinking pool. Not a trace beyond.'
'Game track,' suggested the stranger on the other side of the fire.
'That's what my "boy" said when we struck it. I didn't believe a path so well-used and hard-beaten could be anything but human-made.'
'There's not a human for miles,' said the other. 'Except ourselves,' he added, glancing round the enclosure, where the firelight picked on a cheekbone or a line of teeth, an eye-ball or the protuberance of a hip to suggest rather than reveal the presence of a dozen natives.
'There must be rhino by the score,' persisted Dick, 'to flatten out a path like that.'
'Zebra do a lot. The hoofs of a herd of zebra working regularly between two drinking places.'
'Anyhow, neither was much help to me. So I decided to push back to ... to my base and try again to-morrow. Just before dark I saw your fire.'
'Lucky we lit it early. They're frightened of lions. Always are in uninhabited country.' He jerked his head in the direction of the palisade which surrounded the camp. The farthest glint of the red fire revealed a sort of ragged fence of saplings, eight or ten feet high, sharpened and staked into the ground with leafy boughs laced in between.
'You alone?' asked the stranger.
'I had only one "boy" with me, and I sent him back to camp,' prevaricated Dick.
In telling his story he had avoided mention of Norah. This was only prudent in a country, the affairs of whose tiny white population are common property; but the result had made his tale a little like the Book of Genesis without Eve, and he realised that to maintain this discretion would be increasingly difficult. For the moment, however, he temporised.
His first emotion on catching sight of that point of light through the trees had been unqualified delight. His spirits, which his intimate friends called 'mercurial,' had shot from the depths of despair, where a day of futile wandering had lodged them, to an almost arrogant elation. He only waited to scribble a line to Norah before he plunged across country in the direction of the light.
But that beacon, as if it possessed the qualities of the hope it inspired, proved illusive. Soon night overtook him struggling through thickets and stumbling over outcrops. Perhaps those physical obstacles imposed a pause for thought, for before he reached the camp, he had begun to wonder with what cloak to cover his rather ambiguous position. For the moment he could only decide on a policy of caution. The line he took must vary with the number, condition, and temper of his rescuers. It was possible that he only had to deal with natives.
Except that this guess was wrong, scrutiny of the figure, that sat opposite with eyes shaded from the fire heat, revealed little. The mystery may have been partly due to a lack of interest in third parties habitual to Dick. But in truth there did not seem to be anything very remarkable about the owner of the fire. He was youngish, shortish, darkish. Not a missionary, one would say, or an official or a trader, even had that desolate region offered souls for saving, bodies for the governing, or wants for the supplying.
That he was no plutocrat progressing triumphantly across the continent on a well-boomed shooting trip, the absence of blameless hecatombs of slaughtered buck and poisoned carnivora proclaimed. The modesty of his appointments—Dick was reposing his aching limbs on a packing-case and his host was as ill-provided—and the shabbiness of his torn shorts and frayed shirt underlined the point. Taken all round, an unnoteworthy man whom you would never pick out of a crowd. But as there was no crowd for a thousand miles to pick him from, the appearance of the Apollo Belvedere could not have been more welcome, or indeed more surprising.
Several leading questions designed to dispel the mystery were allowed to fall to the ground unanswered.
It is not impossible that, irritated by these feelers, the stranger was moved to repay in like coin. At any rate he followed up his disconcerting, 'You alone?' with a no less awkward, 'I don't know your name?'
'Brown,' said Dick Ward, after a moment's pause.
'Ah!' said the unknown, eyeing him, to Dick's mind, a trifle aggressively. 'Mine's Smith,' he added after a pause.
Suspicion of mockery crossed Dick's mind, causing him to glance quickly at his host. He appeared immersed in thought. At length he produced the result of his deliberations.
'Better start at dawn,' he said.
'Start?' echoed Dick. 'Where for?'
'Abercorn,' was the monosyllabic reply.
The announcement was not to Dick's taste. In the first place he did not like his plans made for him. Moreover, in his sanguine heart he had reckoned on a loan of at least enough provisions to carry Norah and himself to the nearest white settlement.
But now the man Smith was proposing—almost dictating—a double back into Rhodesia and an amalgamation of forces that would discover Norah's presence. And, as there were people at Abercorn who knew both her and Archie, he would have to tell the truth.
A shade stiffly then (it would never occur to Dick that Smith was in a position to offer whatever arrangement suited him) he replied that he didn't think he could manage to make for Abercorn, adducing as an excuse the state of his feet, which had suffered from the stony and precipitous route he had that day followed.
Smith heard him out without any expression on his face that would reveal his opinion. 'Matao,' he said to his capitao, 'the fire.' He seemed to collapse into his thoughts.
A native, naked save for his blanket, extracted his sprawling limbs from the fire-lit group that talked in sibilant whispers only broken by suppressed laughter at some scandalous tale. From the firewood pile he pulled the pale trunk of a tree long dead, eaten to a skeleton by white ants, and pitched it on to the fire. The impact released a shower of sparks and a flicker of flames that lit the underside of the overhanging boughs, showing their leaves livid against the richness of the sky, like the pattern on a brocade.
That's right, Matao,' said Smith, and relapsed into silence. Then, with the tone of one who had been reasoning all the time—'You see,' he said to Dick, 'you see, I haven't anything I can leave you. I haven't any tins myself or meal for my carriers. So I can't give you any.'
Dick, to whom salvation had seemed assured, felt as if he had been pushed off a cliff. 'We're living on what I shoot,' went on Smith after a pause; 'unfortunately I'm short of ammunition. Bloody short. What guns have you got?'
'Seven point nine Mauser and a heavy Westley Richards,' replied Dick dully.
'So, even if I could spare you any, it wouldn't fit.' Smith seemed to muse. 'I've got a 7.9 at home,' he continued. 'I might have a round or two in my bag. But not enough to be any use.'
A native rose from the fire and disappeared in the direction of the tent, returning at once with the stranger's heavy rifle. Some word understood in the conversation had recalled an unfulfilled task. He took his place by the fire and, producing a bundle of bits of rag, Rangoon oil and a pull-through, sat cross-legged cleaning the gun.
'That's Johnny, my fundi,'[1] said Smith. 'Saved my life the other day. Didn't you, Johnny?'
The native, who did not understand a word, laughed and his teeth flashed white in the darkness.
'So,' went on Smith, whose conversation seemed to follow his thoughts rather than his words, 'we'll have to stick together and do long days to Abercorn and live on what I shoot. I've got ammunition waiting at Abercorn,' he added.
Dick saw that Norah's presence could no longer be concealed. He had no other excuse for rejecting the stranger's scheme. He wished he had been more open from the beginning. Confession was difficult now. In any case a complete explanation to this not very sympathetic stranger was unthinkable. He took the plunge.
'You see, there's my wife,' was his phrase.
The stranger looked at him as if he were going to speak. But when ultimately he did, it was only to say, 'You didn't tell me Mrs. Brown was with you.'
Dick saw that silence was his best defence, and held his tongue while Smith submerged into one of his periods of thought. Dick waited anxiously on the words of this rather mysterious being who held Norah's life and his in his hands. Eventually the arbiter of destinies spoke; more exactly, he whistled.
'We're in a bit of a hole,' he said.
That first person plural relaxed Dick's tautened muscles.
'We'd never get a lady as far as Abercorn,' Smith continued. Dick agreed with a whole heart. 'I've only got enough carriers for my loads. None for her kit, let alone a machila.... If I increased their loads, we'd never make the distance.'
'How far is it?' asked Dick.
'God knows. I'm a stranger in this country, so are my natives. From what you tell me of your trip up the lake we must be over two hundred miles from the south end. Abercorn's twenty miles on.... That's by water—dodging mountains and ravines makes it longer. For instance, there's a road on the other side between M'pala and Badouinville. It's three hours by water and two days on foot.'
'Then why Abercorn?' asked Dick, attaining his objective.
Smith explained that while he didn't know his way to any Boma or settlement on this side of the water, Abercorn would be found by following the lake. And touch need never be lost with drinking water.
'But it's out of the question now,' he declared. 'I was counting on doing it in a fortnight. With the dozen odd rounds I've got, luck and good shooting, we should have been all right for food. But Mrs. Brown could never do twenty-five-mile days.'
Dick agreed.
'I suppose you think,' began Smith, and stopped. 'I'd better tell you,' he began again, 'what I'm doing here without ammunition or food. Else Mrs. Brown may wonder....'
Dick murmured a deprecatory phrase, which fortunately for his curiosity was ignored.
The account which the stranger proceeded to give of himself was not very detailed. He had, Dick gathered, been after elephant somewhere in the Congo. Wonderful game country, not far from the lake. So many elephant that he had used up most of his big bore ammunition. He had plenty of .303 stuff, but his .303 rifle had been twisted into scrap metal by the wounded bull Johnny had saved him from. (Hundred-pound tusks he had.) Then he got into trouble with the Bulamatadi. ('Poaching,' thought Dick.) So that there was question of confiscating his ivory. He'd got too much to risk losing, and he'd induced a fishing village to paddle him and his ulendo across to the British side.
'A bit risky, wasn't it, in a canoe at this time of year?' suggested Dick. 'What if a squall got up?'
'Risky?' repeated Smith. 'Yes, I suppose so. I had to pay the paddlers pretty high. Or rather their headman. I couldn't get enough canoes, either. That's why I left most of my stuff behind.'
He had crossed at night and landed a day's stage north of the present camp. Dick mentally supplied the missing detail of a reverent burial of the ivory on the beach. Now he was on his way to Abercorn.
'But of course I'll stay and see you and your wife through,' he added.
Dick was suitably grateful, but Smith was apparently already thinking of something else.
'We'll have to see what can be done,' he went on. 'Maybe my chaps could build a raft and we could edge our way along the coast till we reach a fishing village.... I'd better move camp alongside of you first thing to-morrow and get to work,' he reflected. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, 'I suppose Mrs. Brown has got a gun.'
Dick explained that the gun was ammunitionless.
'But,' protested Smith, 'you can't leave her alone there without a gun!'
'You're safe from crocs, on land, aren't you?'
'Yes, I think so, but...'
'She's got lots of firewood.' Dick was not as easy as he pretended, but he resented his host's interference, 'and there's not a hope of finding our way down in the dark. It's nearly vertical in parts, and I'm not sure of the way. Even in the daylight we'll have to wait for my "boy" to guide us.'
'Well, she's your wife, not mine,' said Smith, prompted possibly by some attendant angel with a taste for Greek irony.
As if to dismiss the matter, he reached out and offered Dick a cigarette. The metal of the case caught Dick's eye as he accepted, for elephant hunters do not, as a rule, sport gold, and curiosity impelled him to decipher the words engraved inside. The fire had sunk to a glow, but the sardonic-minded angel, anxious to see the fun, whispered to the stranger to kick the smouldering logs, and a tongue of flame licked high enough for Dick to read the words 'Archie from Norah' followed by a date that his retina had not recorded, ere the light had sunk.
There shot through Dick's being a fear as luminous as that arrow of fire and as quickly sped. Of course, even in the small white circle of Central Africa there must be lots of men named 'Archie,' who were given things by women called 'Norah.' Why should not Smith's Christian name be Archie? 'Archie Smith,' a perfectly convincing combination.
He could not help recalling with faint uneasiness that suspicion of mockery when the stranger declared his name. Had he been given a Roland for his Oliver, a Smith for his Brown?
But, even if his name were not Smith, why should it be Sinclair? Archie Sinclair, who was hundreds of miles away 'on cattle business,' presumably at Elizabethville.
With a start he realised that his host had asked him a question. Intent on the problem of the man's identity, he chanced assent, and was relieved when the answer proved adequate.
Of course the fellow might have found or even stolen the case. It certainly was not natural for a hunter to possess such an article ... if he were an elephant hunter. He was up to the knees in a morass of uncertainties; there seemed no bottom to the mystery; but until he was on firm ground, exhausted as he was, he knew he would not sleep. How could he get at the truth? One couldn't very well say to a man, 'I say, Smith, is your name Sinclair? Because, if so, I'm sleeping with your wife.' Nor could he interrogate natives in their master's presence.
Whatever happened, he must escape from this morose tête-à-tête, whose suppressions were driving him to idiocy. Conversation, he felt, would choke him; without it solution was no nearer. He rose to his feet with a gesture of weariness that was not assumed.
'You must take my bed,' said the putative Smith, moved again by the Spirit with a taste for double entendre.
He escorted Dick to the tent and left him there while he went to give orders for his own bed of leaves. Once alone, no pedantic delicacy restrained Dick. With the flair of a private detective, he found a handkerchief. Granted a good wife, this might solve the question. But the emblem 'A.S.' that rewarded his search and testified to a modicum of wifely devotion, only reduced the field to Archies, Sinclair or Smith.
It was not until he thought of looking under the bed that the myth of the latter's existence was exploded. There lay an old uniform case which its owner had preserved from army days. Painted on it, he read, '2nd Lieut. Archibald Sinclair, R.F.A.'”
[1] "Fundi"—native hunter.