He did not go up direct as he had come down in the King of Okky's sixty man-power war canoe. He prospected the labyrinth of waterways for other channels, and charted them out with infinite care. He intended to take every possible precaution for preserving the secrecy of his mine. Even if he was followed, and he took it for granted that on some future voyage he presently would be followed, he wanted to be able to puzzle pursuit.
At a point agreed upon he put into a village which sprawled along the bank, and presented the King's mandate, and demanded canoes. The villagers gave them without enthusiasm and without demur. He took these in tow, great cotton-wood dugouts that would hold a hundred men apiece, and hauled them after him, winding through great tree-hedged waterways where twilight reigned half the day, and then coming out between vast park-like savannas where the sun scorched them unchecked and grazing deer tempted the rifle.
When he arrived at Tin Hill again, the King's finger had left a visible mark. Great heaps of picked ore lay along the waterside ready for loading the flotilla. "Good man, Kallee!" said the Englishman appreciatively. "I'll dash you a new state umbrella for that."
The water-bellows organ that he had set up at the foot of the waterfall bellowed out its boo-paa-bumm, and against each of the great bamboo pipes there fluttered a bunch of red-dyed feathers to show that that other ju-ju man, his majesty of Okky, countersigned the warning not to unduly trespass.
*****
Cargo after cargo Carter rushed down to the Coast, and dumped on land he had hired behind a factory. Ever and again he sent a tidy parcel of ore to a smelter in England and in due time had more money put to his credit at the Bank of West Africa. But he did not try any expensive tricks with the home tin market just then. He had got out a new launch, a more solid affair this time, driven by a sixty horse-power gasolene engine that had low-tension magneto ignition, and so many other improvements on its predecessor, that White-Man's-Trouble, who had it in charge, tied a dried monkey's paw to the compression cock on each cylinder head, as an extra special protective ju-ju.
He carried a cook and an oil-stove galley, and at last even bought two tin plates and a knife and fork to assist his meals. He felt it was pandering to luxury, but he did it all the same. When he made that purchase he wondered how he would behave in a woman's society after so long living as a savage. As an after-thought he told himself that Laura was the woman he had in his mind, and hoped he would not shock her with his crudities. By way of carrying out good intentions to the full, he sat down there and then and wrote to her, and marvelled to find how little he had to say.
Then one day he came across Slade.
A canoe drew in alongside as he was towing down river with his tenth cargo, and brought off a note which said that there was a white man ashore who had run out of everything and would be eternally grateful for any European food that could be spared, and would gladly give him I.O.U. for same, as he was out of hard cash at the moment of writing, and had mislaid his check-book.
Carter had his misgivings, but sent off a goodly parcel of food and tobacco, and continued his way down stream. But the channel was new to him—he had a suspicion of being watched on his ordinary route—and he ran on a sandbar on an ebbing tide, and the heavily laden dugouts were soon perched high and dry. So White-Man's-Trouble switched off his magneto and stopped the engines, and Carter put a hand under the gauze net to greet his prospective father-in-law.