"Where the gold lie is not concern me. I am gentleman of peace and commercio. There is one man, not all the nigger, who think he know, and another not all a white man who will pay him to hinder you. More I only guess at and cannot tell you, but I know you and the Señor Maxwell never pass the Leopard country. Don Ilton, I presume you bold man who come here to make the money. With the sum you mention I show you how. It is not all for the good will, but for the assistance also of me."
Now Dane might have suspected treachery, but he did not do so. Indeed, he was inclined to fancy the offer and warning were genuine. He declined the offer, however; and consulted Maxwell on the first opportunity.
"I believe what he told you was spoken in good faith," Maxwell said; "and he was perfectly correct. The first man he mentioned is probably the rascal who betrayed poor Niven; and Rideau must be the other. He has, if I am correct in my surmises, had dealings not wholly creditable to either, with Dom Pedro; and it is possible the latter might have found us useful. This, combination may, however, increase our difficulties."
CHAPTER VIII
TREACHERY
The region which lies behind the West African coast is not a pleasant one to traverse, and bad fortune seemed to attend Maxwell's expedition from the time it marched out of the seaboard settlement, where he had had trouble with certain French officials, as well as with the black head man from whom he hired his carriers. All of this Dane remembered when he halted, one burning afternoon, shoulder-deep in the tall grass of a swamp, worn out in body and perplexed in mind. Few Europeans are capable of much exertion in that country, especially during the hottest part of the afternoon; but the hammock boys were too weary to drag their burdens farther, and there was urgent need for haste. Dane accordingly had taxed his strength to the utmost during the last few hours. The tall grass stems were almost too hot to touch, and foul mire bubbled about their roots. At least a league of it, through which, slashed by saw-edged blades and stabbed by broken stalks, the expedition must force its way, stretched toward an inland ridge of higher ground that rose from the morass. Beyond this, in turn, flat-topped hills dimmed by a yellow heat haze cut the horizon.
As Dane halted, a naked carrier stumbled, and, dropping the deal case from his woolly crown, splashed him all over. Another straightway fell over his prostrate comrade, and began a spirited attack upon him when they scrambled to their feet again. Dane was too weary to rebuke either in the fashion they would best understand; but a man of dusky color undertook the duty for him, with the barrel of a gaspipe gun, and the combatants, desisting, found new places in the straggling line. A few picked men in flowing white draperies with flintlock guns on their shoulders were already floundering through the swamp ahead. Behind them, almost and wholly naked negroes, many wearing on their forehead the blue band which marks the amphibious Kroo, went splashing by, each bearing a deal case or tarred cloth package upon his crown. Then the rearguard, tall and soldierly men with the blood of the Arab in them, who carried old-fashioned rifles in spite of certain regulations, came up with Maxwell. They wore a ragged white uniform, swore by the Prophet, and were, as Dane subsequently discovered, reliable fighting men. The Krooboys carried a cutlass-shaped matchet, a by no means despicable weapon when rubbed keen with a file.
Maxwell differed in outward appearance from the somewhat fastidious gentleman Dane had known in Scotland. His cotton jacket was badly rent, sun-baked mire clung thickly about his leggings, and one side of his big sun-helmet had been flattened in. The raw condition of his face and neck betokened the power of the last few days' sun, and he blinked a little because his eyes had suffered by the change from the forest shadow to the dazzling brightness and the fibrous dust of the grass.
"Don't let your particular scarecrows get too far ahead of you, Hilton," he cautioned. "I should hardly have suspected you of any inclination to stop and admire the scenery after the opinion you recently expressed concerning this country."
"I'd willingly burn or flood the whole of it if I could," Dane replied irritably. "Miss Castro was not mistaken when she mentioned the shadow that crept up from behind. Ill luck has certainly followed us from the beginning, and it is time we turned round and endeavored to settle up accounts with whoever is the cause of it."