After Challis's adventure with the lions, the villagers, as the way of negroes is, were just as eager to help the white man as they had formerly been reluctant.
A man who, unaided, could kill two lions was surely a very wonderful person. Not even the dreaded Tubus could stand against him. It would be a blessing to the whole countryside if the power of the Tubus were broken. The white man asked their help—he should have it.
The chief ordered all the males of the community to assemble in front of the cave. His eighty fighting-men, splendid specimens of muscular humanity, gathered in a disorderly crowd on one side. Some were almost naked, others wore a sort of shawl folded about them as a Scots shepherd folds his plaid; it left one shoulder bare, and descended to the knee. All carried spears about four feet long.
The other group comprised the boys, the elderly men, and the few weaklings of the tribe.
"I will make Boy Scouts of some of them," said Challis to himself as he viewed them.
The chief led him in and out among the crowd of warriors, pointing to one man as a famous hunter, to another as a mighty thrower of the spear, to a third whose body was scarred with wounds received in fight. He was evidently proud of his men.
"Let the white man take them at once," he said, John interpreting. "They are well fed; they have eaten the flesh of oxen; they are ready even now to follow the killer of lions."
He was as much astonished as disappointed when Challis explained, as tactfully as he could, that he did not yet consider them ready to accompany him back to the fort.
"What more does the white man need?" he asked, somewhat huffily.
Challis reflected for a few moments before replying. He did not quite know how to deal with these ignorant natives, so prompt to take offence and sulk like children. But he was clear in his own mind.
To render effective service against experienced warriors like the Tubus, dashing horsemen armed with guns, accustomed to carry all before them in a wild charge, something more than muscle and goodwill was required.
It was plain that these natives were wholly undisciplined. Challis felt sure that in battle every man acted for himself, without any relation to his comrades, and he had already resolved that they must undergo some sort of elementary training before they could be of any real use.
The matter that worried him was the shortness of time. Royce's provisions might be eked out over a fortnight—what could be done in a fortnight towards training these wild, untutored children of nature?
"You know the Tubus, chief," he said, making up his mind to be frank. "Your people have suffered at their hands—even now you have fled from them. They have horses and guns—you know how helpless your best warriors have been before them. We must change all that. Your men must learn how to fight in such a way that the Tubus' advantages over them are lessened."
This was the gist of his speech, which was very much longer, and expressed in simple words that John could translate. The chief, in spite of the fact that his men had recently run away from the Tubus, seemed annoyed that any doubt was cast on their capacity. But, after a while, he asked sullenly what the white man wished to do.
"First of all, I want you to send messengers to all the friendly villages round about, asking the chiefs to send their best fighting men to join us. Tell them that we are going to fight the Tubus, and put a stop to their evil deeds."
"That shall be done, O white man!"
"Then I want to see what your own men can do with the spear, how they march, and how they attack."
"That shall be done, O white man!"
He gave an order. The warriors formed up, as Challis expected, in single file, and marched thus, lithely as wild animals, before him. At another order they started to run, uttering fierce yells, crowding into an unwieldy mob, and flinging their spears high into the air. The chief watched them proudly, and glanced at Challis as if to say: "Can you wish for anything better than that?"
"It is very good," said Challis, to the chief's great contentment. "Now bring them back; I want to find out which are the best spearmen."
The men, gathering their spears, came running back in a scattered crowd, and collected again in their former shapeless array.
Asking permission from the chief, Challis ordered John to form the men up in line. It was a long and difficult business. No sooner were a few of the negroes placed shoulder to shoulder than one man would step out to see what a particular friend of his was doing some distance away, and showed a good deal of resentment when John hauled him back and explained vigorously that he must not move without leave.
Then another man would find that he had something urgent to say to his mother, among the crowd of women watching the scene curiously, and he would sprint across the ground, engage in animated dialogue with the old woman, and return at his leisure.
John was reduced to despair.
"Silly fellas, sure 'nuff, sah!" he said in dudgeon. "Dey no good—too much fools, all same!"
An idea occurred to Challis. Knowing from his past experience with the Hausas how keenly negroes enter into competition one with another, he ordered John to explain that, if the men kept the line, he would give prizes to the best spearmen as soon as they reached the fort, and make them his own bodyguard.
After the men had gathered into a crowd and squabbled noisily for several minutes, this offer had the desired effect. They allowed themselves to be formed into a line, which, however, all John's efforts could not prevent from gradually assuming a crescent shape. Then, one by one, after several failures to make them act in turn, they threw their spears at the word of command. In this way, Challis selected the twenty men whose cast was the longest and straightest, and they immediately rushed across to the spectators to proclaim their merits.
By this time Challis was very tired.
"Drilling my platoon in the O.T.C. was nothing to this," he said to himself. "How in the world can I make anything of them in a fortnight?"
But after rest and food, he was ready to tackle the work again, and he took heart when he found that the negroes were much more amenable.
The spirit of emulation he had excited among them lightened the task. Every man seemed anxious to win praise from the white man. The idea had got abroad among them that the exercises to which he put them were so much "white man's medicine," something that would have a mystic efficacy when they came in contact with the enemy. As this idea implied unquestioning faith, it was all that Challis required.
He was careful not to keep them too long at one thing. When they had at last seized the idea of a straight line, though still far from successful in achieving it, he set the twenty selected spearmen to compete among themselves, and devoted his attention to the sixty less proficient.
These he determined to turn into pikemen. He got them to cut longer shafts for their spear heads and to sharpen the lower end, so that by the close of the day they were provided with serviceable pikes eight feet long.
The end of the day brought its disappointment. The messengers dispatched by the chief to neighbouring villages returned and reported the complete failure of their mission. Such was the universal dread of the Tubus that no chief was willing to send his men to encounter them. Not even the messengers' report of the lion-killing sufficed to overcome their fears.
"They will sit on the fence," thought Challis. "If we have any success, they'll come tumbling over each other to help. Well, we haven't done so badly for the first day. I must make plans for to-morrow."
He spent that night, not in the fœtid cave, but in the open, protected from wild beasts by a ring of bonfires. After all, he thought, they were too far from the Tubus' camps to attract attention.
Next morning, after repeating the lessons of the previous day, and finding that the men gave much less trouble, he taught them how to extend, moving them up and down with fair success. With John's assistance, he got them to turn right or left at the word of command.
At first they laughed so heartily at the sight of one another moving like teetotums that discipline was in danger of breaking down. Challis himself was amused, thinking how wrathful the loud-voiced drill-instructor at his old school would have been if the boys had taken their drill as lightheartedly as these negroes. But after a time they settled down to learn their new prescription in "white man's medicine," and made the proper movements with creditable smartness.
The next operation was to form three sides of a square—their numbers did not suffice for a full square of any considerable size. This was difficult.
"Do their minds work in curves?" thought Challis despairingly, as the men tended persistently to round the angles and join the ends of the lines.
But even this difficulty was surmounted with patience, and the close of the second day saw him one step nearer the accomplishment of his aim—to train the negroes to sustain the assaults of a mounted enemy.
It was the next stage that he found most difficult of all. A good shot himself, he sighed for rifles, that he might teach the men to shoot. With such obsolete weapons as spears and pikes he felt himself at a loss.
But common sense and recollections of what he had read about Cromwell's army came to his aid. He taught the men forming the three-sided square to stand fast with their pikes planted obliquely in the ground, supported with the left hand, while they held in the right their short stabbing spears.
Meanwhile he practised the twenty selected men in pushing out in advance, casting their spears, and then running back for refuge into the square. The whole force learnt to lie down at the word of command, to rise, to advance, to retire.
In order to accustom them as much as possible to the conditions they would have to meet, he got the chief to send into the neighbourhood to hunt up or purchase horses. Such of the men as could ride he mounted, and he organised sham charges, so that the men on foot grew used to the approach of horses at the gallop.
By the end of the fifth day the negroes had entered into all these exercises with spirit and enjoyment. Nothing pleased them better than the charges of the few horsemen. The spearmen would advance some twenty paces in front of the pikemen, pretend to discharge their spears when the horsemen came within range, then turn and run back between the open ranks of the pikemen, whose weapons were planted at an angle calculated to transfix the oncoming horses and men.
When the spearmen had run behind the pikemen, they would wheel round and discharge another flight of spears. The horsemen carried their sham charge to within a few yards of the spears before they reined up. In their ardour, indeed, they sometimes failed to obey promptly the order to halt, and one or two of them received ugly wounds. But they took these in good part, and, when the day's work was done, were to be seen proudly displaying their injuries to their relatives.
"I only hope they will be as cheerful in the real thing," thought Challis.