The end of the day brought its disappointment. The messengers dispatched by the chief to neighbouring villages returned and reported the complete failure of their mission. Such was the universal dread of the Tubus that no chief was willing to send his men to encounter them. Not even the messengers' report of the lion-killing sufficed to overcome their fears.
"They will sit on the fence," thought Challis. "If we have any success, they'll come tumbling over each other to help. Well, we haven't done so badly for the first day. I must make plans for to-morrow."
He spent that night, not in the fœtid cave, but in the open, protected from wild beasts by a ring of bonfires. After all, he thought, they were too far from the Tubus' camps to attract attention.
Next morning, after repeating the lessons of the previous day, and finding that the men gave much less trouble, he taught them how to extend, moving them up and down with fair success. With John's assistance, he got them to turn right or left at the word of command.
At first they laughed so heartily at the sight of one another moving like teetotums that discipline was in danger of breaking down. Challis himself was amused, thinking how wrathful the loud-voiced drill-instructor at his old school would have been if the boys had taken their drill as lightheartedly as these negroes. But after a time they settled down to learn their new prescription in "white man's medicine," and made the proper movements with creditable smartness.
The next operation was to form three sides of a square—their numbers did not suffice for a full square of any considerable size. This was difficult.
"Do their minds work in curves?" thought Challis despairingly, as the men tended persistently to round the angles and join the ends of the lines.
But even this difficulty was surmounted with patience, and the close of the second day saw him one step nearer the accomplishment of his aim—to train the negroes to sustain the assaults of a mounted enemy.
It was the next stage that he found most difficult of all. A good shot himself, he sighed for rifles, that he might teach the men to shoot. With such obsolete weapons as spears and pikes he felt himself at a loss.
But common sense and recollections of what he had read about Cromwell's army came to his aid. He taught the men forming the three-sided square to stand fast with their pikes planted obliquely in the ground, supported with the left hand, while they held in the right their short stabbing spears.