They reached the canoe and laid Samba gently down upon rugs. The rude craft was soon under way. For a time Samba lay asleep, with his arm about Pat's neck; but by and by, when the paddlers paused in the song with which they accompanied their strokes, the boy awoke, and began to sing himself, in a low musical voice that struck pleasantly upon the ear after the rougher tones of the men.
"Bauro lofundo! (he sang); bauro lofundo! Bompasu la Liwanga bao lindela ud' okunda ilaka nkos'i koka."
This he repeated again and again until he was tired and slept once more.
"Very pretty," said Mr. Martindale. "The boy'd make a fortune in New York, Jack. But what does it all mean, anyway?"
"Berrah nice song, sah," said Nando. "Me tell all 'bout it. People of Bauro, sah, plenty bad lot. Bompasu and Liwanga been and gone after 'long 'long into de forest, not come back till parrots one two free twenty all dah."
"Well, I can't make much of that. Doesn't seem to have any more sense than the songs that our gals sing at home."
But further inquiry brought out the story. It appeared that a rubber collector, not satisfied with exacting from the people of Bauro the usual quantity of rubber, had required them to furnish him by a certain day with twenty young parrots which he wished to take with him to Europe. Being unable to obtain so large a number by the given date, the people were declared to be surpassingly obstinate and wicked, and the sentries Bompasu and Liwanga were let loose upon them until the twenty parrots were delivered.
"Humph!" grunted Mr. Martindale. "Say, wasn't it Macaulay who said he'd write a nation's history from its ballads? Rubber and parrots; what next, I wonder? These Congo people have original ideas in taxation."
"Begorra, sorr," said Barney, "and don't I wish the taxes in the ould counthry were uv the same kind. Sure and ivery man in the counthry would be glad to supply the collectors wid scores uv sparrows or peewits or any other fowl, and murphies and blackthorns—ivery mortal thing but money, sorr."
In the course of a few hours the stream they had hitherto been navigating ran into a larger tributary of the Congo some hundred and fifty miles above the point where it joined the main river. The canoe had scarcely entered the broader river when the crew suddenly stopped paddling, and Nando, turning round with some excitement, said—