Long Odds

by Harold Bindloss

Gavin scarcely smiled. He was growing a trifle impatient with his comrade, who could not recognize when it was necessary to make a sacrifice, and he was ready for his meal. By and by Herrero called to the girl, who filled a calabash from the iron cooking pot hung above the fire, and laid it down in front of him with two basins. The trader lifted a portion of the savory preparation in a wooden spoon and smelled it.

"The pepper is insufficient. How often must one tell you that?" he said, and rising laid a yellow hand upon her arm.

The girl shrank back from him, but he followed her, still holding her arm, and nipped it deeply between the nails of his thumb and forefinger. He did it slowly, and with a certain relish, while his face contracted into a malicious grin. For a moment a fierce light leapt into the girl's eyes, but the torturing grip grew sharper, and it faded again. The man dropped his hand when at last she broke into a little cry, and stooping for the calabash she went back towards the fire. Gavin, who had looked on with an expressionless face, turned to his comrade.

"If you do that too often I think you will be sorry, my friend," he said. "She will cut your throat for you some day."

"No," said Herrero, "it is not a thing that is likely to happen if one uses the stick sufficiently."

His companion smiled in a curious fashion, but said nothing. His mother's people had long ruled the native with a heavy hand, and he had no hesitation in admitting that leniency is seldom advisable. Still, he recognized that in spite of his apathetic patience one may now and then drive the negro over hard, so that when life becomes intolerable he somewhat logically grows reckless and turns upon his oppressors in his desperation, which was a thing that Herrero apparently did not understand.

In the meanwhile the girl crouched silently by the fire, stirring the blistering peppers into the cooking pot, a huddled figure robed in white with meekly bent head and the marks of the white man's brutality upon her dusky body. Every line of the limp figure was suggestive of hopelessness. She might have posed for a statue of Africa in bondage. Still, as it happened, she and the boys who lay apart among the dripping undergrowth glanced now and then towards the forest with apathetic curiosity. Gavin's ears were good, but, after all, he had not depended upon his hearing for life and liberty, as the others had often done, and their keenness of perception was not in him. They knew that strangers were approaching stealthily through the bush. Indeed, they knew that one had flitted about the camp for some little while, but they said nothing. It was the white man's business, and nothing that was likely to result from it could matter much to them.

The fire blazed up a little, but, save for its snapping and the roar of the swollen river, there was silence in the camp, until Gavin rose to one knee with a little exclamation. He had heard nothing, but at last his trained senses had given him a sub-conscious warning that there was something approaching. Just then the girl stirred the fire, and the uncertain radiance flickered upon the towering trunks. It drove an elusive track of brightness back into the shadow, and Herrero scrambled to his feet as a man strode into the light.

He stopped and stood near the fire, dressed in thorn-rent duck, with the wet dripping from him and a little grim smile in his face, and it was significant that although he had nothing in his hands Gavin reached out for the heavy rifle that lay near his side. Strangers are usually received with caution in that part of Africa, and he recognized the man. As it happened, the girl by the fire recognized him, too, and ran forward with a little cry. After all, he had been kind to her while she lived with Lamartine, and it may have been that some vague hope of deliverance sprang up in her mind, for she stopped again and crouched in mute appeal close at his side. Ormsgill laid a hand reassuringly upon her brown shoulder.