The Ivory Trail/Chapter 15

man who tries to explain away coincidences to men who were the victims of them is likely to need more sympathy than he will get. The dictionary defines them clumsily as instances of coinciding, apparently accidental, but which suggest a casual connection.

Lions paid us a visit that first night after Schillingschen’s escape—the first lions we had seen or heard since landing on the north shore of the lake. We prayed they might get Schillingschen, yet they and he persisted until morning—they roaring and circling never near enough for the man on guard to get a shot—he also circling the camp, calling to his ten men, whom we had transferred from the native village to the second tent under guard of Kazimoto and our own men as a precaution.

Our boys slept as if drugged, but not his. He called to them in a language that even Kazimoto did not understand, and they kept answering at intervals. Once, when I was listening to locate Schillingschen if I could, the lions came sniffing and snuffing to the back side of the tent. I tried to stalk them—a rash, reprehensible, tenderfoot trick. Luck was with me; they slunk away in the shadows, and I lived to summon Fred and Will. We tried to save the donkeys, but the lions took three of them at their leisure, and scared the rest so that they broke out of the thorn-bush boma we had made the boys build (as a precaution against leopards, not lions). Next morning out of forty we recovered twenty-five, and wondered how many of them Schillingschen got.

Remembering how we ourselves had managed, without ammunition or supplies, we did not fool ourselves with the belief that Schillingschen, with his brutal personal magnetism and profound knowledge of natives, would not do better. The probability was he would stir up the countryside against us. He had been doing missionary work; it might be the natives of that part were already sufficiently schooled to do murder at his bidding.

We decided to leave at once for a district where he had not yet done any of his infernal preaching.

“You should set a trap and shoot the swine!” Coutlass insisted. Will was inclined to agree with him, but Fred and I demurred. The British writ had never really run as far as the slopes of Elgon, and we could see them ahead of us not very many marches away. If Schillingschen intended to dog us and watch chances we preferred to have him do that in a remote wilderness, where our prospect of influencing natives would likely be as good as his, that was all.

Part of our strategy was to make an early start and march swiftly, taking advantage of his physical weariness after a night in the open on the prowl; but after a few days in camp it is the most difficult thing imaginable to get a crowd of porters started on the march. It was more particularly difficult on that occasion because none of our men were familiar with Schillingschen’s loads, and the captured ten, even when we loosed their hands and treated them friendly, showed no disposition to be useful. We gave them a load apiece to carry, but to every one we had to assign two of our own as guards, so that, what with having lost the fifteen donkeys, we had not a man to spare.

It was after midday when we got off at last. We had not left the camp more than half a mile behind when I looked back and saw Schillingschen where his great tent had stood, cavorting on hands and feet like an enormous dog-baboon, searching every inch of the ground for anything we might have left. We three stood and watched him for half an hour, sweating with fear lest he chance on the place where his diary lay buried in the tin box. We began to wish we had brought it with us. I said we had done foolishly to leave it, although I had approved of Fred’s burying it at the time.

“Suppose,” I argued, “he sets the natives of that village to searching! What’s to prevent him? You know the kind of job they’d make of it—blade by blade of grass—pebble by pebble. Where they found a trace of loosened dirt they’d dig.”

“Did you bury something, then?” inquired a voice we knew too well. “By the ace of stinks, those natives can smell out anything a white man ever touched!”

We turned and faced Coutlass, whom we had imagined on ahead with the safari. If he noticed our sour looks, he saw fit to ignore them; but he took an upperhanded, new, insolent way with us, no doubt due to our refusal to shoot Schillingschen. He ascribed that to a yellow streak.

“I was right. Gassharamminy! I could have sworn I saw two of you on watch while the third man dug among the stones! What did you bury? I came back to talk about Brown. The poor drunkard wants to head more to the east. I say straight on. What do you say?”

We told him to go forward. Then we looked in one another’s eyes, and said nothing. Whether or not the original decision had been wise, there was no question now what was the proper course.

Instead of tiring out Schillingschen we made an early camp by a watercourse, and built a very big protection for the donkeys against lions—a high thorn enclosure, and an outer one not so high, with a space between them wide enough for the two tents and half a dozen big fires. Before dark we had enough fuel stacked up to keep the fires blazing well all night long.

Neither Coutlass nor Brown had had a drink of whisky that day, so it was all the more remarkable that Coutlass lay down early in a corner of the tent and fell into a sound sleep almost at once. We were thoroughly glad of it. Our plan was for two of us to creep out of camp when it was dark enough, and recover the contents of that tin box before Schillingschen or the blacks could forestall us.

The lions began roaring again at about sundown, but they love donkey-meat more than almost any except giraffe, and it was not likely they would trouble us. We were so sure the task was not particularly risky that Fred, who would have insisted on the place of greater danger for himself, consented willingly enough to stay in camp while Will and I went back.

Our original intention was to take Schillingschen’s patent, wind-proof, non-upsettable camp lantern to find the way with and keep wild beasts at bay; but just as Will went toward the tent to fetch it (Fred’s back was turned, over on the far side where he was seeing to the camp-fires) we both at once caught sight of Coutlass creeping on hands and knees along a shadow. We had closed the gap in the outer wall of thorn, but he dragged aside enough to make an opening and slipped through, thinking himself unobserved.

To have followed him with a lantern would have been worse than my crime of stalking lions in the dark. Will ran to tell Fred what had happened while I followed the Greek through the gap, and presently Will and I were both hot on his trail, as close to him as we could keep without letting him hear us.

“Fred says,” Will whispered, “if we catch him talking with Schillingschen, shoot ’em both! Fred won’t let him into camp again unless we bring back proof he’s not a traitor!”

We were pursuing a practiced hunter, who at first kept stopping to make sure he was not followed. He took a line across that wild country in the dark with such assurance, and so swiftly that it was unbelievably hard to follow him quietly. It was not long before we lost sound of him. Then we ran more freely, trusting to luck as much as anything to keep him thinking he had the darkness to himself.

Our short day’s journey seemed to have trebled itself! We were leg-weary and tired-eyed when at last we reached, and nearly fell into a hollow we recognized. Will went down and struck a match to get a look at his watch.

“There ought to be a moon in about ten minutes,” he whispered. “We’re within sight of the place. Suppose we climb a tree and scout about a bit.”

It was not a very big tree that we selected, but it was the biggest; it had low branches, and the merit of being easy to climb.

When the pale latter half of the moon announced itself we could dimly make out from the upper branches all of the flat ground where the camp had been. There was no sign of Coutlass. None of Schillingschen. A lioness and two enormous lions stood facing one another in a triangle, almost exactly on the spot where the larger tent had stood, not fifty yards from us.

“Gee!” whispered Will excitedly. “We nearly stumbled on ’em!”

“Shoot!” I whispered. My own position on the branch was so insecure that I could not have brought my rifle into use without making a prodigious noise. Will shook his head.

“I can see Coutlass now! Look at that rock—he’s hiding behind it—see, he’s climbing! And look, there’s Schillingschen!”

Neither man was aware of the other’s presence, or of ours. They were out of sight of each other, Coutlass on the very rocks against which we had leaned to watch the tent the afternoon before, and neither man really out of reach of anything with claws that cared to go after them in earnest.

The arrival of the dim moon seemed to give the lions their cue for action. The lioness turned half away, as if weary of waiting, and then lay down full-length to watch as one lion sprang at the other with a roar like the wrath of warring worlds. They met in mid-air, claw to claw, and went down together—a roaring, snarling, eight-legged, two-tailed catastrophe—never apart—not still an instant—tearing, beating—rolling over and over—emitting bellows of mingled rage and agony whenever the teeth of one or other brute went home.

Even as shadows fighting in the shadows they were terrible to watch. They shook the very earth and air, as if they owned all the primeval bestial force of all the animals. And the she-lion lay watching them, her eyes like burning yellow coals, not moving a muscle that we could see.

Iron could not have withstood the blows; the thunder of them reached us in the tree! Steel ropes could not have endured the strain as claws went home, and the brutes wrenched, ripped, and yelled in titanic agony. Their fury increased. Wounds did not seem to enfeeble them. Nothing checked the speed of the fighting an instant, until suddenly the lioness stood erect, gave a long loud call like a cat’s, and turned and vanished.

She had seen. She knew. Like a spring loosed from its containing box one of the lions freed himself in mid-air and hurtled clear, landing on all-fours and hurrying away after the lioness with a bad limp. The other lion fell on his side and lay groaning, then roared half-heartedly and dragged himself away.

The second lion had hardly gone when Coutlass descended gingerly from the rock, peering about him, and listening. He evidently had no suspicion of our presence, for he never once looked in our direction. It was Schillingschen, not lions, he feared; and Schillingschen, clambering over the top of another rock, watched him as a night-beast eyes its prey. Another one-act drama was staged, and it was not time for us to come down from the tree yet.

Satisfied he was not followed and that Schillingschen was elsewhere, Coutlass crept from rock to rock toward the little cluster of small ones where, by his own confession, he had seen Fred bury the box. Schillingschen stalked him through the shadows as actively as a great ape, making no sound, as clearly visible to us as he was invisible to Coutlass.

There was not a trace of mist—nothing to obscure the dim pale light, and as the moon swung higher into space we could see both men’s every movement, like the play of marionettes.

Down on his knees at last among the small loose rocks, Coutlass began digging with his fingers—grew weary of that very soon, and drew out the long knife from his boot—dug with that like a frenzied man until from our tree we heard the hard point strike on metal. Then Schillingschen began to close in, and it was time for us to drop down from the tree.

We made an abominable lot of noise about it, for the tree creaked, and our clothing tore on the thorny projections of limbs that seemed to have grown there since we climbed. To make matters worse, I stepped off the lowest branch, imagining there was another branch beneath it, and fell headlong, rifle and all, with a clatter and thump that should have alarmed the village half a mile away. And Will, not knowing what I had done but alarmed by the noise I made, jumped down on top of me.

We picked ourselves up and listened. We could hear the short quick stabs of the knife as Coutlass loosed and scooped the earth out. Among the myriad noises of the African night our own, that seemed appalling to us, had passed unnoticed—or perhaps Schillingschen heard, and thought it was the injured lion dragging himself away. (Nobody needed worry about the chance of attack from that particular lion for many a night to come; he would ask nothing better than to be left to eat mice and carrion until his awful wounds were healed.)

Reassured by the sound of digging we crept forward, knowing pretty well the best path to take from having seen Schillingschen stalking. But it was more by dint of their obsession than by any skill of ours that we crept up near without giving them alarm. Coutlass was still on his knees, throwing out the last few handfuls of loose dirt. Schillingschen stood almost over him, so close that the thrown dirt struck against his legs.

We took up positions in the shadow, one to either side, almost afraid to breathe, I cursing because the rifle quivered in my two hands like the proverbial aspen leaf. The prospect of shooting a white man—even such a thorough-paced blackguard white as Schillingschen—made me as nervous as a school-girl at a grown-up party.

At last Coutlass groped down shoulder-deep and drew the box out.

“Give that to me!” Schillingschen shouted like a thunder-clap, making me jump as if I were the one intended.

The moonlight gleamed on the tin box. Coutlass did not drop it but turned his head to look behind him. Schillingschen swung for his face with a clenched fist and the whole weight and strength of his ungainly body. He would have broken the jaw he aimed at had the blow landed; but the Greek’s wit was too swift.

He kicked like a mule, hard and suddenly, ducking his head, and then diving backward between the German’s legs that were outspread to give him balance and leverage for the fist-blow. Schillingschen pitched over him head-forward, landing on both hands with one shoulder in the hole out of which the box had come. With the other arm he reached for the knife that Coutlass had laid on the loose earth. Coutlass reached for it, too, too late, and there followed a fight not at all inferior in fury to the battle of the lions. Humans are only feebler than the beasts, not less malicious.

Will reached for the tin box, opened it, took out the diary, closed it again, put the diary in his own inner pocket, and returned the box; but they never saw or heard him. The German, with an arm as strong as an ape’s, thrust again and again at Coutlass, missing his skin by a bait’s breadth as the Greek held off the blows with the utmost strength of both hands.

Suddenly Coutlass sprang to his feet, broke loose for a second, landed a terrific kick in the German’s stomach, and closed again. He twisted Schillingschen’s great splay beard into a wisp and wrenched it, forcing his head back, holding the knife-hand in his own left, and spitting between the German’s parted teeth; then threw all his weight on him suddenly, and they went down together, Coutlass on top and Schillingschen stabbing violently in the direction of his ribs.

Letting go the beard, Coutlass rained blows on the German’s face with his free fist. Made frantic by that assault Schillingschen squirmed and upset the Greek’s balance, rolled him partly over and, blinded by a very rain of blows, slashed and stabbed half a dozen times. Coutlass screamed once, and swore twice as the knife got in between his bones. The German could not wrench it out again. With both hands free now, the Greek seized him by the throat and began to throttle him, beating with his forehead on the purple face the while his steel fingers kneaded, as if the throat were dough.

We were not at all inclined to stop Coutlass from killing the man. We came closer, to see the end, and Coutlass caught sight of us at last.

“Shoot him!” he screamed. “Gassharamminy! Shoot him, can’t you, while I hold him!”

As he made that appeal the German convulsed his whole body like an earthquake, wrenched the knife loose at last, and as Coutlass changed position to guard against a new terrific stab rolled him over, freed himself and stood with upraised hand to give the finishing blow. Then suddenly he saw us and his jaw dropped, the beastly mess that had been his well-kept beard dropping an inch and showing where the Greeks fist had broken the front teeth. But that was only for a second—a second that gave Coutlass time to rise to his knees, and dodge the descending blow.

I made up my mind then it was time to shoot the German, whatever the crimes of the Greek might be; but Coutlass had not grown slower of wit from loss of blood. As he dodged he rolled sidewise and seized my rifle, jerking it from my hand. He jerked too quickly. The German saw the move and kicked it, sending it spinning several yards away. We all made a sudden scramble for it, Schillingschen leading, when the German turned as suddenly as one of the great apes he so resembled, tripped Will by the heel, wrenched the rifle from his right hand, pounced on the empty tin box, and was gone!

Too late, I remembered my own rifle and fired after him, emptying the magazine at shadows.

Will’s rage and self-contempt were more distressing than the Greek’s spouting knife-wounds.

“By blood and knuckle-bones! Give me that gun of yours, will you! I go after the swine! I cut his liver out! Where is my knife? Ah, there it is! Stoop and give it me, for my ribs hurt! So! Now I go after him!”

We held Coutlass back, making him be still while we tore his shirt in strips, and then our own, and tried to staunch the blood, Will almost blubbering with rage while his fingers worked, and the Greek cursing us both for wasting time.

“He has the box!” he screamed. “He has the rifle!”

“He has no ammunition but what’s in the magazine,” said I; and that started Will off swearing at himself all over again from the beginning.

“You damned yegg!” he complained as he knotted two strips of shirt. “This would never have happened if you hadn’t sneaked out to steal the contents of the box!”

Suddenly Coutlass screamed again, like a mad stallion smelling battle.

“There he is! There the swine is! I see him! I hear him! Give me that—”

He reached for my rifle, but I was too quick that time and stepped back out of range of his arm. As I did that the blood burst anew from his wounds. He put his left hand to his side and scattered the hot blood up in the air in a sort of votive offering to the gods of Greek revenge, and, brandishing the long knife, tore away into the dark.

“I see him!” he yelled. “I see the swine! By Gassharamminy! To-night his naked feet’ll blister on the floor of hell!”

We followed him, enthralled by mixed motives made of desire and a sort of half-genuine respect for the courage of this man, who claimed three countries and disgraced each one at intervals in turn. We did not go so fast as he. We were not so enamored of the risks the dark contained.

Suddenly there came out of the blackness just ahead a marrow-curdling cry—agony, rage, and desperation—that surely no human ever uttered—roar, yelp of pain, and battle-cry in one.

“Help!” yelled Coutlass. “Help! Oh-ah! Ah!”

We raced forward then, I leading with my rifle thrust forward. A second later I fired; and that was the only time in my life I ever touched a lion’s face with a rifle muzzle before I pulled the trigger! The brute fell all in a heap, with Coutlass underneath him and the Greek’s long knife stuck in his shoulder to the hilt. The lion must have died within the minute without my shot to finish him.

Coutlass lay dead under the defeated beast that had crawled away to hide and lick his wounds. We dragged his body out from under, and in proof that Schillingschen, the common enemy, lived, a bullet came whistling between us. The flash of my shot had given him direction. Perhaps he could see us, too, against the moon. We ducked, and lay still, but no more shots came.

“He’s only got four left,” Will whispered. “Maybe he’ll husband those!”

“Maybe he knows by now that box is empty!” said I. “He’ll stalk us on the way back!”

“Us for the tree, then, until morning!” said Will.

“Sure!” I answered. “And he shot out of it like crows out of a nest!”

But Will had the right idea for all that. He was merely getting at it in his own way. After a little whispering we went to work with fevered fingers, stripping off the bloody bandages we had tied on the Greek’s ribs—stripping off more of his clothes—then more of ours—tying them all into one—then skinning the mangled lion with the long knife that had really ended his career, tearing the hide into strips and knotting them each to each. In twenty minutes we had a slippery, smeary, smelly rope of sorts. In five more we had dragged the Greek’s dead body underneath the tree.

Then I went back to the vantage point among the rocks and waited until Will had thrown the rope with a stone tied to its end over an upper branch. Presently I saw Coutlass’ dead body go clambering ungracefully up among the branches, looking so much less dead than alive that I thought at first Will must have tangled the rope in the crotch of the tree and be clambering up to release it.

The ruse worked. Georges Coutlass served us dead as well as living. Out of the darkness to my left there came a flash and a report. I did not look to see whether the corpse in the tree jerked as the bullet struck. Before the flash had died—almost before the crack of the report had reached my ear-drums I answered with three shots in quick succession.

“Did you get him?” called Will.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “If I didn’t, he’s only got three cartridges left!”

We left the Greek’s body in the tree for Schillingschen to shoot at further if he saw fit; it was safer there from marauding animals than if we had laid it on the ground, and as for the rites of the dead, it was a toss-up which was better, kites and vultures, or jackals and the ants. We saw no sense that night in laboring with a knife and our hands to bury a body that the brutes would dig up again within five minutes of our leaving it.

“Schillingschen has three cartridges,” said Will. “One each for you, me and Fred Oakes! I’ll stay and trick him some more. I’ll think up a new plan. I don’t care if he gets me. I’d hate to face Fred without my rifle, and have to tell him the enemy is laying for him with it through my carelessness.”

It was my first experience of Will with hysteria, for it amounted to that. I remembered that to cure a bevy of school-girls of it one should rap out something sharply, with a cane if need be. Yet Will was not like a school-girl, and his hysteria took the pseudo-manly form of refusal to retreat. I yearned for Fred’s camp-fires, and Fred’s laugh, hot supper, or breakfast, or whatever the meal would be, and blankets. Will, with a ruthless murderer stalking him in the dark, yearned only for self-contentment. All at once I saw the thing to do, and thrust my rifle in his hands.

“Take it,” I said. “Hunt Schillingschen all night if you want to. I’m going back to tell Fred I’ve lost my rifle, and was afraid to face you for fear you’d laugh at me. Go on—take it! No, you’ve got to take it!”

I let the rifle fall at his feet, and he was forced to pick it up. By that time I was on my way, and he had to hurry if he hoped to catch me. I kept him hurrying—cursing, and calling out to wait. And so, hours later, we arrived in sight of Fred’s fires and answered his cheery challenge:

“Halt there, or I’ll shoot your bally head off!”

Lions had kept him busy making the boys pile thornwood on the fires. He had shot two—one inside the enclosure, where the brute had jumped in a vain effort to reach the frantic donkeys. We stumbled over the carcass of the other as we made our way toward the gate-gap, and dragged it in ignominiously by the tail (not such an easy task as the uninitiated might imagine.)

Once within the enclosure I left Will to tell Fred his story as best suited him, Fred roaring with laughter as he watched Will’s rueful face, yet turning suddenly on Brown to curse him like a criminal for laughing, too!

“Go and fetch that Mauser of yours, Brown, and give it to Mr. Yerkes in place of what he’s lost! Hurry, please!”

It was touch and go whether Brown would obey. But he happened to be sober, and realized that he had committed the impermissible offense. Fred might laugh at Will all he chose; so might I; either of us might laugh Fred out of countenance; or they might howl derisively at me. But Brown, camp-fellow though he was, and not bad fellow though he was, was not of our inner-guard. He might laugh with, never at, especially when catastrophe brought inner feelings to the surface.

“Take the shot-gun if you care to,” Fred told him, as he passed Will the rifle. “I’ll unlock the chop-box presently, and let you have some whisky!”

This last was the cruelest cut, but it did Brown good. When Fred kept his promise and produced a whole bottle from the locked-up store Brown refused to touch it, instead insulting him like a good man, cursing him—whisky, whiskers, whims and all, using language that Fred good-naturedly assured him was very unladylike.

Before dawn the boys, peering through the gaps between the camp-fires, to distinguish lions if they could and give the alarm before another could jump in and do damage, swore they saw Schillingschen, rifle in hand, stalking among the shadows. Nothing could convince them they had not seen him. They said he stooped like a man in a dream—that big beard was matted, and his shirt torn—that he strode out of darkness into darkness like a man whose mind was gone. We purposely laughed at their story, to see if we could shake them in it. But they laughed at our incredulity.

“My eyes are good eyes” answered Kazimoto. “What I see I see! Why should I invent lies?”

It was not pleasant to imagine Schillingschen, mind gone or not, with or without three cartridges and a rifle, prowling about our camp awaiting opportunity to do murder.

“Come to think of it,” said Fred, “we’ve no proof he hasn’t a lot more than three cartridges. It’s hardly likely, but he might have cached some in reserve near where we found his camp pitched. More unlikely things have happened. But the bally man must go to sleep some time. He seems to have been awake ever since he escaped. We’ll be off at dawn, and either tire him out or leave him!”

“I’ll bet he’s got one or more of those donkeys,” I answered. “He’ll not be so easy to tire.”

“Suppose you and Will go and sleep,” suggested Fred. “Otherwise we’ll all go crazy, and all get left behind!”

There did not remain much time for sleeping. The porters, being used to the tents and their loads now, got away to a good start, heading straight toward the frowning pile of Elgon that hove its great hump against a blue sky and domineered over the world to the northward.

There were plenty of villages, well filled with timid spear-men and hard-working naked wives. Now that we had trade goods in plenty there was no difficulty at all about making friends with them. They had two obsessing fears: that it might not rain in proper season, and “the people” as they called themselves would “have too much hunger;” and that the men from the mountain might come and take their babies.

“Which men, from what mountain?”

“Bad men, from very high up on that mountain!” They pointed toward Elgon, shuddered, and looked away.

“Why should they take your babies?”

“They eat them!”

“What makes you think that?”

“We know it! They come! Once in so often they come and fight with us, and take away, and kill and eat our fat babies!”

All the inhabitants of all the villages agreed. None of them had ever ventured on the mountain; but all agreed that very bad black men came raiding from the upper slopes at uncertain intervals. There was no variation of the tale.

One thing puzzled us much more than the cannibal story. We heard shooting a long way off behind us to our right—two shots, followed by the unmistakable ringing echo among growing trees. Had Schillingschen decided to desert us? And if so, how did he dare squander two of his three cartridges at once—supposing he were not now mad, as our boys, and his, all vowed he was? His own ten men began to beg to be protected from him, and the captured Baganda recommended in best missionary English that we seek the services of the first witch doctor we could find.