Tom Willoughby's Scouts: A Story of the War in German East Africa

by Herbert Strang

Standing up, he discovered that his right ankle was sprained.

"They'll have to carry me home," he thought, "and the sooner the better; the stuff here must have been rotting for years. I wish to goodness Reinecke would come."

Once more he shouted, then tried to scale the wall of the pit; but this was perpendicular, and it was evidently a case of cutting notches in it--a tiresome job to a man who could scarcely stand. It struck him that he had better bind up the gash in his leg as well as he could. When the men came he would get them to carry him to the lake and bathe the wound. How lucky it was that he had escaped with only one wound, and that in no vital spot! Looking at that ugly array of spikes, he shuddered at the thought of the hideous injuries they might have inflicted.

While tying his handkerchief tightly round his leg he shouted from time to time. Was it possible that Reinecke had met with a similar misfortune? For the first time Tom felt really uneasy. Reinecke's call to him had been very faint, and had not been repeated. If they were both in the same predicament there was no hope of relief until the negroes came up from the plantation. To make sure of their not missing him, he shouted and fired at intervals, until almost all his cartridges were gone. Still there was no response.

He looked up the wall of the pit. It was eleven or twelve feet high. If only he could raise himself high enough to get his arms on the edge, the rest would be easy. It should not take very long to cut a few notches in the earth: one of the spikes would form a serviceable tool. He worked one out of the ground, and rose to his feet, wincing with the pain that shot through his sprained ankle. To his chagrin, the earth of the pit wall was friable. It crumbled as he drove the spike into it; so far from making a hole that would afford him a firm foothold, he succeeded only in breaking down a part of the wall.

"Fairly trapped," he thought, and sat down again to ease his aching legs.

His watch announced midday. The men ought to have arrived by this time. They would carry food and drink, and he was very thirsty. The rendezvous was well known to them: surely they had not mistaken Reinecke's instructions. And then at last he was startled by a suspicion that sprang up suddenly in his mind--a suspicion so horrible that he strove to crush it. Reinecke might have lied to him about the vouchers; was he villain enough to have decoyed him deliberately to this cunningly concealed trap--deliberately schemed to clear finally out of his path the man whom he regarded as a stumbling-block on his way to fortune, the discoverer of his crimes?

The thought, terrible as it was, would not be stifled. Tom recalled the gradual changes in the German's manner--the descent from almost excessive cordiality to stiffness, sarcasm, positive rudeness: then the sudden return to geniality, the apparent eagerness to indulge his guest. For the first time he was struck with the peculiar arrangements for the day's shooting expedition--the sending him on alone, the absence of gunbearers. This train of thought, once started, was carried on remorselessly by Tom's active imagination. Granted the man's intention of putting him out of the way, how easily one detail fitted into another! How naturally the Englishman's disappearance could be explained! It was known to every one on the plantation that he had sometimes gone shooting alone. Reinecke could say, and his statement could be corroborated, that his guest had started alone on this morning, he himself being engaged with correspondence. He had followed later, according to arrangement, but had failed to meet the Englishman at the appointed spot. He had searched for him, and after some days had found the poor fellow's remains at the bottom of an old, long disused game-pit. How plausible the story would be! Bob, thousands of miles away, would grieve: the story might get into the papers: people would read the paragraph, perhaps sigh, and pass on to a scandal nearer home, or to the latest news of the trouble in Ireland. In a few weeks Tom Willoughby would be only the shadow of a name.

Impatient with himself at the length his imagination had carried him, Tom shouted again, fired off another cartridge--the last but one. "I must keep one for emergencies," he thought. He made another attempt to cut holes in the wall, and threw the spike from him in disgust at the second failure. It occurred to him to heap up debris at the foot of the wall, to form a mounting block; but at the stirring of the putrid mass innumerable insects, beetles, reptiles, foul nameless things issued forth, causing him to shudder with loathing, and to shrink at actual pain from their bites and stings. Overcome with nausea, he retreated to a far corner where this creeping population had not been disturbed, and for a time, weary as he was, sickened by his increasing pain, he leant against the wall, rather than sit down again, until sheer fatigue compelled him to make an uneasy seat of his slanted rifle.

With the passage of time his thirst became a torture, and the shouts he uttered ever and anon sounded cracked and harsh from his parched throat. A sort of lethargy settled upon him: not a stoic resignation, a calm acquiescence in fate's decree, but a numbness of the senses and the mind. For a time he was scarcely conscious of pain, of the things moving at his feet, of the gradual cooling of the air as evening drew on. Then he roused himself with a start, and heedless of stings and the loathsome touch of obscene creatures, he gathered up heaps of rotted leaves and twigs and the litter that had fallen under him, and began with frantic energy to pile them against the wall. His weight crushed them into half their former bulk, and he fell exhausted on the futile pillar.