“I am very sensible,” said he, “of the care and attention you have bestowed on me during the past weeks. I owe you a considerable debt, which I will endeavour to repay, at all events, by following your directions implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send me in the corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his own language and explain what is to be done.”
“Good,” said Adams, and he went out and found the corporal and sent him in to Berselius.
“Good!” The word was not capacious enough to express what he felt. Freedom, Light, Humanity, the sight of a civilized face, for these he ached with a great longing, and they were all there at the end of the rubber road, only waiting to be met with.
He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest.
“Another ten days,” said Adams.
The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thousands of years, waved its branches to the wind.
A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams’s cheek, and in the “hush” of the trees there seemed a murmur of derision and the whisper of a threat.
“It is not well to shake your fist at the gods—in the open.”
Adams went back to the house to begin preparations, and for the next week he was busy. From some spare canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a litter strong enough to carry Berselius—he had to do nearly all the work himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless as workmen. Then stores had to be arranged and put together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes had to be mended and patched—even his boots had to be cobbled with twine—but at last all was ready, and on the day before they started the weather improved. The sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right to the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like ranges of snow-covered mountains.
That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams announced his intention of going on a little expedition of his own.