There was very little to indicate that the path had already been traversed by a large Arab force. Occasionally the advance-guard came upon the remains of a human body, sometimes a mere skeleton with chains still about the neck and ankles--some poor slave left by the Arabs to die of starvation or by the more merciful agency of the wild beasts that haunted the forest shades. The native habit was to walk round these horrible obstructions in the path, but Tom had ordered his men to remove them into the forest.
On the sixth day of the march his foremost pioneer came running back to him in great excitement. He had come upon a dead body lying across the path, and he declared positively that it was the corpse of Mabruki.
Tom was at first incredulous, but on reaching the spot he saw that the figure stretched on the path was unmistakeably that of the medicine-man. He lay face downwards, and innumerable insects were already at work on his body; but he could not have been dead long, for there was no sign of mutilation by any wild beast. One of the men turned the body over, and then Tom saw a pigmy spear transfixing the traitor's breast. The weapon was evidently poisoned, for the twisted limbs and contorted features indicated that the hapless man had tasted death in one of its most terrible forms.
"Put him out of sight!" said Tom, shuddering as he passed on. He surmised that on escaping from the village to avoid the penalty due to his treason, Mabruki had struck due north and had used his knowledge of the forest to make his way by side tracks into the depths far from the main path. He had struck into that path when all fear of meeting Tom's men was gone, and then, while on his way to join the Arabs, or perhaps to foist his false magic upon some lesser chief, he had met with swift death at the hands of the Bambute.
The tragic end of the medicine-man made a deep impression on the natives. Many of them had believed that he was invulnerable to everything but superior magic, such as Kuboko's, and his death by so paltry a weapon as a pigmy's spear destroyed the last shred of their faith in him. Hearing now for the first time the story of his treason, they were quick to connect his fate with his crime, and said among themselves that white man's medicine certainly reached far and never failed.
Day followed day, and the march was little varied. Once or twice the column passed the sites of what had been small villages, now waste and desolate. The Arabs had burnt and destroyed every human habitation upon or near their path. There were streams here and there to be crossed, sometimes by fords, sometimes by tall trunks thrown across from bank to bank, once on a bridge consisting of a large tree submerged two feet below the surface. Whenever a temporary thinness in the foliage overhead allowed the sunlight to stream fully on the path, the spirits of the men seemed to respond, and they broke into song. Tom noticed the leader in these choruses, a tall handsome young fellow with a fine mellow voice, clearly a prime favourite with the men. His songs were composed on the spur of the moment, but they were picked up at once by his comrades, who raised the chorus in strange wild harmony, Tom had become so accustomed to the ingenuous adulation of the negroes that it no longer caused a pang to his modesty to hear himself made the subject of their pæans. One of their songs, roughly rendered in English, ran:--
"Sing, O friends, sing!
We are all warriors bold, and Kuboko is king.
Aha! Aha!
Strong is his arm and invincible; sing, brothers, sing!
Blithely we march. Ah! what will the enemy say?
On to the fortress; long is the way.
Then we will eat and drink, dance all the livelong day.
Aha! Aha!"
Thanks to the slow rate of marching, regulated by the pace of the carriers, to the good food-supply, and to the physical fitness of the men when they started, there had not been more than fifty cases of sickness in the column, when, after twenty days' marching, Tom learnt from his prisoners that he was but half a day from the lake in which the Arab fort was situated. He pitched his camp that evening with even more care than usual, and gave strict orders that no member of the force was to stir beyond its bounds without permission. He sent forward a few scouts to reconnoitre, and one of these reported, on his return to camp, that he had caught sight of several Arabs making their way rapidly towards the lake.
"The enemy's scouts!" thought Tom. "Well, we could not hope to surprise them."
He posted extra sentries that night, though he hardly expected an attack, and the hours of darkness passed without incident. By ten o'clock next morning, Tom, with the head of the column, had reached the lake side. It was a larger sheet of water than he had expected to see, extending as far as the eye could reach in a north-westerly direction, bordered to the very edge with dense forest and extensive banks of reeds. Some miles off, almost equidistant between the east and west shores, rose the island, a mass of dark green in the blue water. As the warriors came in sight of it they raised great shouts. Not one of them had seen it before, for the escape of a slave was an almost unknown event. Tom himself felt a strange thrill as he looked over the placid water and realized that that distant forest-covered islet was to be the scene of a stern fight. He stood gazing at it in silence, thinking of the long years during which it had been a hot-bed of cruelty and wrong, and he felt a thrill of joy at having attained the desire of his heart--the opportunity to strike at the head of the slave-dragon. "And," he said to himself, "please God, I will strike hard!"