With Edged Tools

by Henry Seton Merriman

He turned quite away from them, and stooped to attach the lace of his boot.

“I can travel night and day, and be back here in three days,” he added. “In the meantime you can be getting on with the loading of the canoes, and we will start as soon as I get back.”

He stood upright and looked around with weatherwise, furtive eyes.

“Seems to me,” he said, “there's thunder coming. I think I had better be off at once.”

In the course of his inspection of the lowering clouds which hung, black as ink, just above the trees, his eyes lighted on Joseph, standing within the door of the cottage, watching him with a singular half-suppressed smile.

“Yes,” he said hurriedly, “I will start at once. I can eat some sort of a breakfast when we are under way.”

He looked beneath his lashes quickly from Jack to Guy and back again. Their silent acquiescence was not quite satisfactory. Then he called his own men, and spoke to them in a tongue unknown to the Englishmen. He hurried forward their preparations with a feverish irritability which made Jack Meredith think of the first time he had ever seen Durnovo—a few miles farther down the river—all palpitating and trembling with climatic nervousness. His face was quite yellow, and there was a line drawn diagonally from the nostrils down each cheek, to lose itself ultimately in the heavy black moustache.

Before he stepped into his canoe the thunder was rumbling in the distance, and the air was still as death. Breathing was an effort; the inhaled air did not satisfy the lungs, and seemed powerless to expand them.

Overhead the clouds, of a blue-black intensity, seemed almost to touch the trees; the river was of ink. The rowers said nothing, but they lingered on the bank and watched Durnovo's face anxiously. When he took his seat in the canoe they looked protestingly up to the sky. Durnovo said something to them rapidly, and they laid their paddles to the water.

Scarcely had the boat disappeared in the bend of the river before the rain broke. It came with the rush of an express train—the trees bending before the squall like reeds. The face of the river was tormented into a white fury by the drops which splashed up again a foot in height. The lashing of the water on the bare backs of the negroes was distinctly audible to Victor Durnovo.