"Why didn't he point it out to them?"
"I fancy he wanted to see how they'd stand fire, and break them in. Felt he could afford to throw a few of them away, as he certainly could, and he only stepped in when the thing was commencing to discourage them."
"It's quite likely you're right," and Nares looked at his comrade with a little wry smile. "Still, after all, I'm not sure it's very material."
The lines grew a trifle deeper on Ormsgill's worn face. "No," he said, "the real question is what our dusky acquaintance means to do with us, and we have to face it. Personally, I don't think he means us any harm, but it's certain he won't let us go until he and his friends have cleaned out San Roque. You see, in an affair of this kind the first blow must be successful, and he has probably a lurking suspicion that we might warn Dom Erminio. The trouble is that once the rebellion breaks out it will be almost impossible for us to reach the coast."
He spoke quietly, but there was a strain in his voice, and Nares guessed what he felt.
"I suppose he wouldn't be content with our assurance that we'd say nothing?" he suggested.
"Would you make it?"
Nares sat very still for a few moments, with a curious look in his eyes, and one hand closed, and his comrade once more recognized that there had been a change in him of late. He had the fever on him slightly, and while that is nothing unusual in those forests, he had grown perceptibly harder and grimmer during the last few weeks. Now and then he also gave way to outbreaks of indignation, which, so far as Ormsgill knew, was not a thing he had hitherto been addicted to doing. Still, the latter was aware that the white man's mental balance is apt to become a trifle unsettled in that land.
"I can't tell. It's a question I've grappled with in one shape or other before," he said. "The land is full of iniquities and horrors, and I think that some of them can only be washed out in blood. That law stands as it has always done. The great trade road to the south of us is paved with the bones of the victims, and they still come down to die, worked out in a few years on the plantations. It is a thing that can't go on."
He opened and closed a thin hand savagely while his voice rose to a harsher note. "For one man killed by the bullet if war breaks out a hundred perish yearly under the driver's lash on the great roads and, I think, among the coffee plants. They are dumb cattle, here and in the Congo. They can not tell their troubles, and they have no friends. How could they when the white man grows rich by their toil and anguish? Still, this earth is the Lord's, and there are men in it who will listen when once what is being done in this land of darkness is clearly told them. One must believe it or throw away all faith in humanity. I think if it rested with me I would let these bushmen come down and crush their oppressors, since it seems there is no other way of making their sorrows known."