"Hold on!" Mr. Wallace broke in with a puzzled frown. "Surely you don't mean that, Mac! There could be no feudal system of that sort here in the very heart of Africa! The blacks haven't the brains—"
"Aye, but the whites have!" cried Montenay triumphantly. "These white pigmies ain't fools by any means, as ye'll see later. Now will ye quit interruptin' me?"
"Go ahead," laughed Mr. Wallace, and the boys saw that Captain Mac was really so interested in his own story that he was anxious to lay it before them without more delay.
"I meant to tell ye this yarn," he went on, "a bit later on, as ye'll see also. The party o' whites were in command of a young chap named Mbopo, an' we took to each other first crack. Well, they carried us off through the jungle for a week's trip. We must ha' been on the edge o' the pigmy country, for we traveled hard. At every pigmy village Mbopo seemed to get reports or somethin' o' the kind, an' also tribute in the way o' slaves. By the end o' the week there were six others besides oursel's.
"Then we spent a day at the village o' the white pigmies. Man alive, ye should ha' seen 'em! They seemed to live on the blacks, just like the blacks live on the big tribes around, an' they lived well. Palm huts, o' course, but there seemed to be a system o' government that beat ever'thing I ever saw outside the Zulus.
"We passed through two more o' the white villages, then struck a big stream an' followed that for a day or two. Finally we got into a bit o' higher ground an' struck the biggest surprise of all. Just before sunset we came out o' the forest into a stretch o' yam patches along the river. Beyond these an' right ahead of us was the biggest village we had seen yet—three to four hundred huts, I'd say. Outside was the whole tribe waitin' for us. Off to one side, near the forest, was a good sized palm hut, and around it was a zareba."
"What's queer about that?" asked Mr. Wallace, as the narrator paused for a moment. The boys saw a smile flicker across Montenay's face.
"The zareba was made out o' ivory," was his quiet reply. Burt at once broke into a laugh, thinking that Captain Mac was joking.
"Pretty good," he chuckled. "What'd they do—cut up the tusks into square blocks to make a six-foot wall?" But his mirth died away suddenly as his uncle made a silencing gesture.
"An ivory zareba," went on Montenay. "Made o' tusks, clear around the hut. They were set with points up, curvin' out. But I didn't get much chance to see it then. We were taken into the village and I was given a hut to myself. The young chap, Mbopo, reported to an old, wizened witch-doctor who was the boss. I judged he was speakin' in my favor, but the old fellow shook his head an' waved a hand at the separate hut. The whole crowd set up a yell o' 'Pongo!' Then they threw me into the hut.