"Have you forgotten Miss Castro? Your powers of attraction may prove a dangerous gift, Hilton."
Dane flushed with sudden anger, for this appeared to him ill-timed levity; but Maxwell continued unheeding:
"The whole complication resembles a mosaic puzzle, and I have fitted most of it together. One or two pieces, however, are missing, and we must wait until accident supplies them. Meanwhile, every effort to expedite our sick men's recovery would be advisable."
Maxwell left his comrade startled and uneasy. Dane could see that he was anxious, and they already had sufficient to try their endurance without the addition of a haunting fear. There was, however, no remedy, and they continued to tend the sick, setting those who had recovered to work as the pestilence slackened its grip. So, while groups of naked tribesmen whose tongue nobody therein could understand traveled southward past the camp, the days went by until Maxwell was supplied with one missing portion of his mosaic. One morning a seaboard negro, whose leg had been rendered useless by the horrible Guinea worm which had burrowed from knee to ankle, crawled into camp, and told a story which roused both listeners to suppressed fury. Rideau had left him behind crippled, to starve, but with many sufferings he had managed to drag himself to their camp.
"I be missionary boy, sah, and savvy them JuJu palaver be all dam fraud," he stated in the coast English. "When them low white nigger Rideau lib for them first river by the Leopards' country he send one man two day into the bush."
"What was the man like? How that boy he look?" asked Maxwell.
"Yellow man with mark on front of him head, sah. He be fit to make fetich palaver."
"Oh," commented Maxwell. "This is going to be very interesting, Hilton."
"Two night go," continued the negro. "Then I look them white man he wait for somebody sitting with a pistol outside him tent. I lib for behind a cottonwood, where he not done see me. Bimeby, two leopard come soffly, soffly, and stand up when he see them. The white man light a lamp before him say: 'Why you done play them fool trick with me?'"
"You were too frightened to crawl away?" Maxwell asked; and though the negro evidently trembled at the mere recollection, he answered boldly: