From the night came a hundred whispering noises, but above all these, unmistakable, the faint clatter of an answering drum. The white man frowned in his perplexity. "No village is nearer than the Bongindanga," he muttered, "not even a fishing village; the woods are deserted——"
The native held up a warning finger, and bent his head, listening. He was reading the message that the drum sent. Sanders waited; he knew the wonderful fact of this native telegraph, how it sent news through the trackless wilds. He could not understand it, no European could; but he had respect for its mystery.
"A white man is here," read the native; "he has the sickness."
"A white man!"
In the darkness Sanders' eyebrows rose incredulously.
"He is a foolish one," N'Kema read; "he sits in the Forest of Happy Thoughts, and will not move."
Sanders clicked his lips impatiently. "No white man would sit in the Forest of Happy Thoughts," he said, half to himself, "unless he were mad."
But the distant drum monotonously repeated the outrageous news. Here, indeed, in the heart of the loveliest glade in all Africa, encamped in the very centre of the Green Path of Death, was a white man, a sick white man—in the Forest of Happy Thoughts—a sick white man.
So the drum went on and on, till Sanders, rousing his own lo-koli man, sent an answer crashing along the river, and began to dress hurriedly.
In the forest lay a very sick man. He had chosen the site for the camp himself. It was in a clearing, near a little creek that wound between high elephant-grass to the river. Mainward chose it, just before the sickness came, because it was pretty. This was altogether an inadequate reason; but Mainward was a sentimentalist, and his life was a long record of choosing pretty camping places, irrespective of danger. "He was," said a newspaper, commenting on the crowning disaster which sent him a fugitive from justice to the wild lands of Africa, "over-burdened with imagination." Mainward was cursed with ill-timed confidence; this was one of the reasons he chose to linger in that deadly strip of land of the Ituri, which is clumsily named by the natives "The Lands-where-all-bad-thoughts-become-good-thoughts" and poetically adapted by explorers and daring traders as "The Forest of Happy Dreams." Over-confidence had generally been Mainward's undoing—over-confidence in the ability of his horses to win races; over-confidence in his own ability to secure money to hide his defalcations—he was a director in the Welshire County Bank once—over-confidence in securing the love of a woman, who, when the crash came, looked at him blankly and said she was sorry, but she had no idea he felt towards her like that——