“What is that?” asked the half-breed.
“It must be Joseph,” answered Guy, “or Meredith. It can be nobody else.”
“Let us hope that it is Meredith,” said Durnovo with a forced laugh, “but I doubt it.”
Oscard looked down in his sallow, powerful face. He was not quick at such things, but at that moment he felt strangely certain that Victor Durnovo was hoping that Meredith was dead.
“I hope it isn't,” he answered, and without another word he strode away down the little pathway from the summit into the clouds, loading his rifle as he went.
Durnovo and his men, working among the Simiacine bushes, heard from time to time a signal shot as the two Englishmen groped their way towards each other through the everlasting night of the African forest.
It was midday before the new-comers were espied making their way painfully up the slope, and Joseph's welcome was not so much in Durnovo's handshake, in Guy Oscard's silent approval, as in the row of grinning, good-natured black faces behind Durnovo's back.
That night laughter was heard in the men's camp for the first time for many weeks—nay, several months. According to the account that Joseph gave to his dusky admirers, he had been on terms of the closest familiarity with the wives, and families of all who had such at Loango or on the Coast. He knew the mother of one, had met the sweetheart of another, and confessed that it was only due to the fact that he was not “a marryin' man” that he had not stayed at Loango for the rest of his life. It was somewhat singular that he had nothing but good news to give.
Durnovo heard the clatter of tongues, and Guy Oscard, smoking his contemplative pipe in a camp-chair before his hut door, noticed that the sound did not seem very welcome.
Joseph's arrival with ten new men seemed to give a fresh zest to the work, and the carefully-packed cases of Simiacine began to fill Oscard's tent to some inconvenience. Thus things went on for two tranquil weeks.