Mbutu shrugged, and set the boy, now fully recovered and crying lustily, upon his feet. Instantly he scampered off with wild delight to his mother. She snatched him up, smothered him with kisses, then threw him over her back and ran fleetly into the forest. In vain Mbutu called to her to bring food, shouting that the big white man would give his buttons, his coat, anything, for a chicken and some plantains. His voice only made her run the faster, and soon a turn in the narrow path concealed her altogether from view.
"We'd better go along the path after her," said Tom. "There must be a pigmy village somewhere near, and they're surely human enough to give us food."
Mbutu shook his head.
"Bambute much bad people," he said. "See white man; no fink; shoot one, two, three; sah dead."
"But we saved the youngster."
"Bambute no stop fink. Woman say big sah, berrah big; Bambute no wait; all come in one big hurry, shoot sah. Better go away too quick."
"Well, you ought to know them better than I." (He suddenly, in one of those odd flashes of memory that come at the most unlikely moments, remembered Mr. Barkworth's positive statement: "There's no gratitude in these natives!") "Let us go, then; lead the way."
They scrambled along the bank, stumbling over rocks and projecting thorn-sprays, Mbutu urging his master to hurry, lest the whole pigmy village should come hot-foot at their heels. It seemed strange to Tom that the little people should feel animosity against inoffensive travellers who had actually done them a service, but he relied upon his boy, in whom he had seen no signs of cowardice. The fact was that Mbutu had never before actually come into contact with the pigmies, and knew them only by hearsay. He had a child's dread of the unknown, and the stories he had heard prompted him to keep as far as possible out of harm's way.
Tom's exertions, acting on his enfeebled frame, had worn him out, and but for Mbutu's entreaties he would have refused to budge. His clothes were drying in the sunlight, but he was chilled to the bone, and terribly hungry. Mbutu insisted that they ought to hide their trail by wading in the stream where it was shallow enough, and thus, alternately on land and in water, they covered rather more than three miles. Then Tom declared that he could go no farther, and sat down upon a dry rock to rest, while Mbutu scrambled up the bank and into the forest in search of food. He brought back a handful of papaws and amoma fruits.
"Why, this is quite luxurious!" said Tom, delighted at getting a change from the disagreeable roots on which he had subsisted for the past few days.