Long Odds

by Harold Bindloss

"We march in a few hours, and as we can not leave you here you and the boys you asked me for will come with us," he said. "What our business is does not concern you, and you will go with us as prisoners. Just now I do not know what we will do with you afterwards. It will depend"—and he looked at Ormsgill with a little grim smile—"a good deal upon your own behavior."

Ormsgill, who grasped the gist of what he said, could take a hint, and went back to Nares. The latter listened quietly when he told him what he had heard.

"I believe there is no other way. Their oppressors have brought it upon their own heads," he said.

His comrade noticed the curious hardness of his face, and the glint in his eyes. It was very evident to him that Nares, who had been down again with fever while they lay in the sweltering heat, had changed. He had borne many troubles uncomplainingly for several weary years, and, perhaps because of it, the events of the last few weeks had left their mark on him. After all, there is a subtle concord between mind and body, and in that land, at least, the fever-shaken white man who persists in staggering on under a burden greater than he can reasonably bear is apt to be suddenly crushed by it. Then his bodily strength or mental faculties give way once for all beneath the strain. Ormsgill could not define the change in his companion, but he recognized it. It was a thing which he had seen happen to other men.

They started in the heat of that afternoon, and Ormsgill, marching with his boys, watched the long dusky column wind into the forest in front of him. There were men with Snider rifles, which they were indifferently accustomed to, men with glinting matchets, and men with flintlock guns and spears, besides rows of plodding carriers. They were half-naked most of them, men of primitive passions and no great intelligence, but they had risen at last in their desperation to strike for freedom. Behind them rose a tumultuous uproar of barbaric music, insistent and deafening, that floated far over the forest. Ormsgill smiled a little as it grew fainter.

"I'm not sure there will be any music when they come back again," he said. "Still, I almost think they will accomplish—something."

Nares looked straight in front of him as he plodded on, but there was a curious gleam in his eyes.

"There is no other way," was all he said.

The long dusky column pushed on steadily through dim forest, wide morass, and tracts of hot white sand, and it happened one evening when the advance guard were a considerable distance ahead that Dom Erminio sat alone on the veranda at San Roque. It was then about eight o'clock, and the night was very dark and hot. Now and then a little fitful breeze crept up the misty river, and filled the forest that rose above it with mysterious noises. Then it dropped away again, and left a silence the Chefe commenced to find oppressive behind it. He could hear the oily gurgle of sliding water, and at times a sharp crackle in the crazy building behind him, out of which there drifted a damp mildewy smell, but that merely emphasized the almost disconcerting absence of any other sound. Indeed, it was so still that the soft rustle his duck garments made as he moved jarred on him, and he was glad when the little muggy breeze flowed into the veranda again.

There was nothing in all this to trouble a man who was accustomed to it, but the Chefe was not quite at his ease. Dom Luiz, whom he had sent out a few days earlier, should have been back that afternoon, but there was no sign of him yet, nor had the three or four dusky soldiers who had gone out on some business of their own with his consent as yet made an appearance. There were very few men in the fort, and when nine o'clock came Dom Erminio, who was quite aware that the natives had no great cause to love him, admitted that he was a trifle anxious. Still, he had, with what he considered a more sufficient reason, been anxious rather frequently. It was a thing one became accustomed to in the debatable land, and sitting still he lighted another cigar. He could see the mists that rolled up from the river, and the forest cutting faintly black against the sky, and wondered vaguely what was going on in it. That there was something going on in it he now felt tolerably certain, though he did not exactly know why.