On down the river we went, with flying paddles, and round a bend. But as we passed the bend, I looked back, and saw coming after us, first one canoe, then two, then six, then so many that I lost all count.
How far we had come in that one night, I had little or no idea; but it was easy to see by the attitude of those who knew the river better than I, that the end of our journey was close at hand. Glancing round at our pursuers, Gleazen spoke in an undertone to Matterson, and both they and the trader studied the shore ahead of us.
"A scant ten miles," Gleazen muttered; "only ten miles more."
I felt the heavy dugout leap forward under the fierce pull of our paddles. The water turned away from the bow in foam, and we fairly outrode the current. But fast though we were, the war fleets behind us were faster. By the next bend they had gained a hundred yards, by the next, another hundred. We now led them by a scant quarter of a mile, and if Gleazen had estimated our distance rightly, they would have had us long before we could reach port. But suddenly, all unexpectedly, round the next bend, not half a mile away, the mission sprang into sight.
There it stood, in the early morning sun, as clean and cool and still as if it were a thousand miles away from Africa and all its wars.
"Give me your pistols," Arnold cried; and when we tossed them to him and in frantic haste resumed our paddling, he coolly renewed the priming and one by one fired them at our pursuers.
That the negroes had a gun we then learned, for they retorted by a single shot; but the shot went wild and the arrows that followed it fell short, and our pistols cooled their eagerness. So we swept in to the landing by the mission, and beached the canoe, and ran up the long straight path to the mission house as fast as we could go, while the black canoemen paused in midstream and let their craft swing with the current.
The place, as we came rushing up to it, was so quiet, so peaceful, so free from any faintest sign of the terrible days through which we had passed, that it seemed as if, after all, we had never left it; as if we were waking from a troubled sleep; as if we had spent a thousand years in the still, hazy heat of that very clearing. The face in the window, the opening door, only intensified that uncanny sense of familiarity.
The door opened, and the man we had seen before met us. His eyes were stern and inhospitable.