Some of the negroes began to chatter; some shrank farther back; but there was presently an ominous growling, and again the mob surged forward, one man with a matchet launching himself straight at his white master. Hitherto he had shown himself both cheerful and docile, but now he seemed possessed of a devil, the devil of fear transmuted into maniacal savagery. Maxwell did not at first see him, and when he did it would have been too late, but that Dane whirled aloft the shovel, and when it came down the negro fell like a pole-axed ox at his comrade's feet. Even then Dane felt sick and sorry as he saw the red drops run from the steel, for he had often encouragingly patted his victim's brawny shoulder; but the negro is above all things unstable, and that blow was the saving of many lives. The crowd stood silent, cowed for a few moments by the swift retribution.
"Thanks," said Maxwell; "I think you have nipped it in the bud, Hilton."
Before he began to speak again his lieutenant, Amadu, and Dane's special follower, Monday, sprang to their side. Both carried rifles; and that turned the scale. Before half an hour had elapsed the two had not only restored a degree of confidence and order, but had picked out a number of men who might be trusted to act as sanitary police. By this time, however, the plague had claimed other victims, and Maxwell started forthwith to choose an isolated site for a hospital camp; while Dane, moving to and fro among the laborers, set apart any with suspicious symptoms.
It was midnight before either found leisure for food or rest, and then Dane knelt, with a biscuit in one hand, beside the little medicine chest in the tent, while Maxwell bent over a medical treatise as he ate. Several sick men lay moaning just outside the illuminated canvas, and one, apparently in delirium, had during the last hour never ceased crooning the hammock-bearers' song.
"That chanty grows wearisome," said Maxwell at length; and, because Dane was overwrought, his companion's composure jarred upon him.
"Put down that tin and hold the glass for me. You have eaten three biscuits already, and this is no time for feasting! I'm going to start with chlorodyne. We found it good in South America when we could give it to them quick enough; but these fellows have an irritating trick of crawling away into some lair to die quietly. There. Give this to the first two poor devils, half each by measure."
Maxwell went swiftly, and returned very grim in face.
"Too late," he reported. "One is cold already; the other testified that there is but one Allah as I bent over him, and ended in a gurgle. Hallo! What is this?"
Preceded by a negro carrying a torch, Rideau, smoking sedulously, approached the tent, and halted well clear of it. The man was not, as his partners had cause to know, unduly timid, but now fear was plainly stamped on his face, which the red glare of the torch forced up against the gloom.
"I have great fear of this sick, and make proposition," he said. "I go take all the boy of me back a league into the forest, and make other camp. If any he is fall ill, I with all possible expedition send him you."