After Carl had gone, and she was alone in the outer office, Grace sank heavily into her chair, and pointing her finger at the door through which he had just passed, she muttered, through clinched teeth, “I’ll get you yet. Yes, I’ll be at the dock when you return, all right. And what will happen then will be some surprise to you and your desert vamp.”
When one is in a hurry, delay sets in. Such were Carl’s thoughts when the hour of sailing had long passed, and still the steamer remained in her berth. But all delays come to an end sometime, and at noon the vessel was warped from the dock, and soon Carl was waving a farewell to New York’s skyscrapers.
As the boat steamed out to sea, Carl thought of the rum-runners he had encountered on his last trip. He wondered whether the boats he saw on the horizon were of that calling. But these were but passing fancies. His thoughts were in Africa, beside a little lake and of a girl, who even now might be in grave danger.
The passage to Spain was a slow one it is true, but to Carl it seemed as if they would never get there. The hours of sea travel became days in his fancy and the days ages. Every low-lying cloud bank, he prayed meant land, and when it proved otherwise, he cursed the fact that he did not have a real “Meteor,” like the one of his dream, at his disposal.
At last Cadiz hove in sight. Assured by the Captain of the steamer he had come over on, that he could get passage on a freighter or cattleboat engaged in trade along the African coast, he hurried from the ship and immediately sought the offices of the steamship people named by the Captain.
Luck smiled kindly on him. There was a vessel leaving that day, destined to Spanish Africa. It was a tramp freighter, but it seemed a floating palace to Carl.
On board, Carl made plans on how to reach Timbuktoo in the quickest possible way. The steamer would take him to Senegal. From there he could take the railroad that runs along the Senegal River, for some eight hundred miles, into the African interior. So far so good. At the terminus of the railway, however, he faced a journey of some three or four hundred miles on horseback. That was the part he dreaded. As good a horseman as he was, he realized the strain such a journey would place upon man and beast, especially so if they were in a hurry. But the journey itself did not worry him as much as the procuring of sufficient relays of horses to carry on.
Slow as the trip across the Atlantic had seemed, the passage of the freighter along the African Coast was still slower and more tedious.
Languidly the vessel crept from port to port. Being a tramp her holds held a general cargo consigned to hundreds of different points in the interior of the continent, which meant a stop at a half dozen different coast towns. The mere calling at these varied ports would not have displeased Carl as much as did the fact that the Captain of the boat saw fit to lay-up at each of the ports for a day or two. To plead with him for a more hurried journey was useless. He had made the trip a half hundred times, he told Carl, and it was always fast enough to suit him. And when an African coaster says that, he means it.
Carl was desperate, when, one rainy morning, some four weeks after leaving New York, he finally left the steamer at the port of Saint Louis, lying at the mouth of the Senegal River.