"But you can't eat it raw, surely! Ugh! you'll make me sick."
Mbutu put down the morsel with a look in which mingled emotions were expressed.
"Make fire in two ticks," he said resignedly, a phrase he had heard Tom use; and in a short time he was toasting some steaks at the fire, while his master searched for fruit. He found a few berries, and both he and Mbutu ate their meal ravenously, feeling still hungry when they had finished.
The fourth day of their forest march was but a repetition of the third. They found almost nothing eatable, and even good water was scarcer than on the previous day. At one point a huge puff-adder lay coiled in their path, and Mbutu wished to kill it, assuring his master that the reptile was too sluggish to defend itself. But Tom shuddered, and bade him come away. Later in the day Mbutu suddenly flung his knife at a tawny creature with black spots and a long, striped, bushy tail--a genet cat, as Tom afterwards discovered,--but the weapon missed by barely an inch. That was the last chance they had that day of securing animal food, and they had to content themselves with a few dry and unpalatable, though perfectly wholesome, roots, which Mbutu grubbed up, and the leaves of herbs growing low.
Both the travellers had spoken jestingly of their hunger, for each was unwilling to depress the other; but it was a hollow pretence. Both, but Tom more especially, were already feeling the weakening effects of privation.
Before they settled for the night, Tom thought it well to speak plainly to Mbutu. His own uneasiness was deepened by his feeling of responsibility for the boy.
"Mbutu," he said gravely, "if we do not find food to-morrow we shall begin to starve. I don't know what starvation means; it is too horrible, almost, to think of. Yet we must face the possibility. Now, I brought you into this, and it isn't fair that you should come to harm on my account. If we find no food to-morrow, I think you had better go on without me. You can make your way more easily than I, and if you come to a village and get food you can bring me some; if not, go on; it is better for one to starve than two."
"No! no! no!" said Mbutu vehemently; "sah fader and mudder. Food come by and by; no die dis time."
But the poor boy, when his master had fallen asleep, looked anxiously at his pinched face. The cheeks were thinned and drawn, there were dark sunken patches below the eyes, and his tall frame seemed even taller and thinner. Ever since the young Englishman had saved him from De Castro's whip, Mbutu had cherished a sentiment of absolute devotion for him, only intensified by the hazards of their later adventures. He would have laid down his life for him, and indeed, though Tom had not noticed it, the boy had already stinted himself even of the little food he had obtained. "My master is much bigger than I," was his half-formed thought, "and needs more to keep his strength up."
The morning of their fifth day in the forest broke dull and depressing. Huge blankets of mist clothed tree and shrub, and a light breeze set up strange cross currents which rolled great white billows one against another, swirling and eddying, twisting and twining like animate things. Tom shivered as he awoke; the violent changes of temperature had made him somewhat feverish, and his sunken eyes, unnaturally bright, seemed for a moment to gaze out vacantly upon the encircling walls of misty green. His limbs ached, and he got up stiffly. Mbutu was not in sight, but returned presently, bringing with him some cassava tubers and arum roots which he cooked for his master's breakfast. Tom found it difficult to eat them. He smiled a weary smile.