"Here's death or glory! A swift journey to the heart of the forest!"
Maxwell generally frowned upon anything that approached the theatrical, but, as he touched his comrade's glass with his own, his face was grave.
"Heaven send us both back safe out of it and—because the one implies the other—confound the cross-marked man!"
Dane asked no questions. Maxwell was always slightly oracular, and might not have answered them; and a few minutes later they were being rowed off to the steamer in company with Dom Pedro Castro.
The Manyamba was not a fast boat; she anchored off many surf-hammered beaches before she reached the one where the adventurers had arranged to disembark, and where, as it happened, Dom Pedro had built his principal factory. He proved a pleasant companion, though Dane fancied that he was weak alike in character and in principle. One day as they rolled slowly along the spray-veiled coast with a maze of half-seen mangroves over the port hand, Dom Pedro sauntered across the deck toward Dane.
"You go up into the Leopard's country to look for gold?" he said, glancing at Dane in a manner which puzzled him.
"We are certainly going inland, but I am afraid that is all I can tell you," Dane replied guardedly.
Dom Pedro smiled.
"Then you seek the gold. Even your countrymen do not go into that forest for pleasure. But only one man, I think, has seen that gold since the men of my nation who came after Gama ruled this country. That man he die, as you call it, crazy. How much your expedition cost you, Don Ilton?"
Dane mentioned an approximate sum, expressing his surprise that the questioner should even have guessed their object, but refraining from stating whether the guess was a correct one; and the elder man spread out his yellow palms deprecatingly.