Accordingly, some three weeks later, the party set out, Dick passing with them through the forest to the landing-stage. One by one they shook hands with him and entered the native boat. Meinheer Van Somering swept his hat from his head and gave a deep flourish and bow. Mr Pepson smiled his encouraging smile, while the agent busied himself with the sail.
“Push off!” sang out the leader, and at the shout Dick sent the boat out into the stream. Her head was pointed down towards the river Pra, her sail filled, and within a minute Dick was alone in the forest. His duties had commenced, he was now sole agent for the gold-miners, the only white man in that part of the African forests. He turned on his heel, saw that the launch and the other boats were firmly secured to the bank, and went off with his head in the air, whistling cheerily.
Chapter Seven.
Forewarned is Forearmed.
“I don’t like the news, Johnnie,” said our hero, one day, some weeks later, when he had quite settled down to his duties at the mine. “You say you saw some men encamped five miles and more away. Tell me all about them.”
The native lad, an inhabitant of the coast near Sierra Leone, who had come from that part with Mr Pepson, and who had been left to keep Dick company and to tend to the launch, put the short black pipe which he was smoking into the other corner of his mouth, and turned his eyes up till the whites alone showed, a trick of which he was very fond. He was, in fact, a comical-looking fellow. Short and square for a native, with woolly hair, and a few stray wisps of beard at his chin, he was dressed in a much patched pair of breeches, with ragged edges, the tags hanging about his naked toes. These same breeches were suspended from his shoulders by an ancient pair of braces, a gift from Dick himself, while a soiled and disreputable jacket, smeared with many a patch of grease, was over his back, serving for shirt as well as coat. He held a rifle in his hand, and the state of his feet showed that he had just come in from the forest.
“Me go dere, as you say,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth. “Me look for something to eat, for massa want fresh meat. And then me see smoke. ‘Dat strange,’ say Johnnie. On de coast where me lib noting wrong in dat. Fires eberywhere. Smoke all de time. But here—”