All this Tom only learnt in course of time; but he knew and suspected enough already to be convinced that the only hope of dealing a successful blow at the raiders lay in using the material ready to hand. Mwonga's people were too few in number to cope with the Arabs unaided; but there must be many villages in the surrounding country whose interests lay in making common cause against the common enemy. Here another difficulty faced him at once. As had been shown by the reply given to one of the messengers sent out during the siege, a combination of African chiefs was no easy thing to effect. They were all jealous of one another; suspicious of being led into a trap; unwilling to put themselves at the orders of any one chief in supreme command. Yet no other course would meet the case, and Tom resolved to make the attempt, hoping that a European, who had already won their respect, might succeed where an African would almost certainly fail. The news of Barega's great victory, and the fame of his own share in it, would spread, within a few days, far and wide through the country; indeed, the contingents which had come into the village for protection were already beginning to scatter to their several homes. "A few days for the leaven to work," thought Tom, "and then I'll send out messengers to several of the chiefs within thirty miles, asking them to attend a grand palaver with me. And as I suppose they'll be madly jealous if I ask them outright to come into this village, we shall have to fix on neutral ground for the meeting. I'll go and consult my friend the katikiro."
Msala cordially agreed with the plan proposed, and messengers were at once selected for the mission. Four of the neighbouring chiefs were invited to repair, on the eighth day, to a hill some five miles distant from Mwonga's village, each bringing seven of his principal men, there to meet Kuboko, as representing Mwonga, with an equal number. At the same time two runners, in accordance with Msala's promise, were sent eastwards, to make the best of their way towards the Nyanza, and to inform any white men they might meet of the presence of Kuboko in their village. Tom found it quite impossible to get them to pronounce his name, and there was not a scrap of paper in the place; but he worked his surname on a piece of linen, with the aid of clumsy wooden needles borrowed from one of Barega's widows, and gave that to one of the couriers.
Having a week to spend before the grand palaver, Tom, with his usual energy, adopted measures to improve the military efficiency of the force. This he knew would be a matter of time and patience, and it was important to begin at once. His first care, naturally, was to strengthen their moral. He singled out the men who had distinguished themselves in the recent fighting, and had also shown general evidence of intelligence and aptitude, and these he placed in command of companies of a hundred men each. He selected a hundred to act as a body-guard to himself and the chief, and six of them, in addition to the katikiro, formed a sort of staff. There was great eagerness among the warriors to be enrolled among this special corps, and Tom decided to make enrolment in it a reward for good service. He drilled the men with particular care, and was gratified by the readiness with which they obeyed him, the exact attention they paid to all his instructions, and the quickness they showed in carrying them out.
On the second day after the defeat of the Arabs, Tom ordered the rescued slaves to be paraded before him, and offered them the alternatives of immediate freedom, in which case they would have to shift for themselves, and enrolment in the military force. They were delighted at the chance of fighting their late masters, and nine-tenths of them joyfully accepted the offer of service. A man who has been a slave, indeed, is usually very loth to accept absolute freedom, for he has become so accustomed to dependence as to lose all will-power, and the loss of a master means the loss of the means of living. The slaves were a very mixed lot, almost every tribe for a hundred miles round being represented among them--tall men and short men, cannibals and vegetarians; but Tom hoped that a little regular training and the memory of their past sufferings would induce a kind of esprit de corps, and that in course of time they would prove a useful addition to the force. He had to contend with symptoms of jealousy and dislike among his own people, but by combined tact and firmness he succeeded in preventing any serious squabbles.
In Barega's time private quarrels among the people had been settled with the knife, and public offences purged by means of various ordeals invented by the medicine-man. To put a stop to such rough-and-ready methods, Tom appointed a court, consisting of the chief officials and himself, to hear complaints and try cases, meeting three times a week in the compound of his hut. The African is very ready to experiment, and is especially delighted with anything in the way of ceremonial where he has a chance to exhibit his oratorical power. He is also quick to appreciate true justice, so that Tom found his court a success, if somewhat trying to his patience because of its long-windedness. Mabruki, however, deeply resented his deposition from the office of lord chief-justice, and added this to the heavy grudge he already bore Kuboko.
With five hundred and fifty warriors and about two hundred and fifty freed slaves, Tom found himself in command of an effective force of eight hundred men, excluding boys under sixteen, who were drafted into a cadet corps, the nucleus of which already existed in the late chief's mutuma or "boys' brigade". Four hours every day were devoted to teaching the troops the elements of drill--just sufficient to give them cohesion and enable them to perform the simpler evolutions. Two hours were given to special drill--the throwing up of breastworks, for instance, for protection from rifle fire. It was, he thought, his special good fortune that the sergeant-major who instructed the cadet corps at school had taken the keenest interest in his profession, and had given the cadets under his charge a real liking for their work. Tom saw that only by superior discipline could he hope to counterbalance the superior armament and greater numbers of the Arabs.
From the outset he had to face a difficulty in the want of firearms and ammunition. As a result of their recent victory the Bahima had become possessors of some two hundred rifles and muskets; but even with these they would make but a poor show against the hundreds of well-armed Arabs whom they might have to encounter. Besides, the ammunition recovered from the water was insignificant. There were a few unspoilt kegs of powder, and a few cases of cartridges for the rifles, but they were barely sufficient to provide eighty rounds a man. Further, as only a few of his troops had ever handled a gun of any kind, there would scarcely be more than enough ammunition to give the learners sufficient musketry practice. Tom was appalled, when he began to instruct them, at the waste due to their timidity, and to their tendency to use their weapons as playthings. Yet, with two hundred serviceable weapons, it seemed a pity that they should be useless, and he wondered whether by some means or other a further supply of at least powder might not be obtained.
On the third day after the despatch of the messengers, it occurred to him that it might be possible to manufacture some powder. From his earliest years he had been fond of "messing", as unappreciative seniors put it, from the making of toffee to the more or less successful manufacture of fireworks. He had picked up at odd times also, owing to this scientific curiosity, a certain working acquaintance with various industrial processes not directly connected with marine engineering, and knew that the constituents of gunpowder may be easily prepared from the raw material. But there was the rub; the absence of any one of the constituents would render the others useless. In the Congo Forest, with its hundreds of thousands of square miles of dense woodland, extending over a space as large as France and Spain together, there would be no lack of wood for charcoal; saltpetre he had found in considerable quantities within a mile from the village; but in addition to these a supply of sulphur was needed, and where was he to look for that?
While thinking over the problem he remembered that during his illness he had been entertained by the katikiro with a long story of a malignant spirit inhabiting a certain mountain some six hours' march to the south-east of the village. As a boy the katikiro could remember this terrible being bursting forth in a large sheet of flame from the bowels of the mountain, with a horrible rumbling sound that shook the solid earth for miles around, casting immense rocks miles up into the air, engulfing the surrounding country in a cloud of smoke and fire, and turning the streams into rivers of boiling mud. Many villages with all their inhabitants had been utterly destroyed; even in Barega's the shower of cinders from the sky set fire to several of the huts. For years afterwards the mountain gave off dense clouds of smoke; but these gradually ceased, and the evil spirit had since then been quiet. Nevertheless nobody from Barega's or any of the neighbouring villages had ventured to approach the mountain since these fearful happenings.
Remembering this, Tom guessed that the scene of this eruption, which was apparently an isolated peak, was connected with the great Central African volcanic system extending from Lake Kivu to the Semliki. On his march from Lake Mazingo on the track of his uncle's expedition he had passed over ground that was evidently of volcanic origin; and he surmised that this part of Central Africa had at some time or other been the scene of enormous volcanic activities. The important fact now, however, was that a volcano known to have been active was in his immediate neighbourhood. He knew that sulphurous fumes were thrown off from volcanoes; was there any chance of finding sulphur itself in any workable form on the slope of this adjacent mountain? It was worth trying, and he resolved to make a careful examination of the ground.