He was fleet of foot, and guessed that he could easily outstrip the askaris, laden with their service packs. The danger was that he might lose his way in the forest. All his men had disappeared; they would probably find their way back to the nullah without difficulty. It was important, however, that he should not be long behind them, for if they should report that he was captured or killed, the people might be seized with panic, and all his work be overthrown. He had left the glade at a different point from that at which he had entered it, and so could not follow the track made by his men. But fortune favoured him. He had not pushed his way far among the trees when he struck a game track, along which, if the askaris also did not discover it, he could make still swifter progress than they, hindered by the bush.
Some few minutes later, the track brought him to a small stream: it had no doubt been trodden by animals in quest of water. He jumped into the stream, ran a short distance in the same direction as the current, then made a long jump into a clump of low shrubs on the right bank. Replacing as well as he could the disarranged vegetation, so as to give no clue to his pursuers, he plunged once more into the bush, in the hope of coming by and by upon a cross track that would lead towards the nullah.
[CHAPTER XIV--THE TRAIL]
Never before had Tom been alone in the bush. On the few occasions when he had gone shooting alone, during his sojourn in Reinecke's bungalow, he had always followed well-defined tracks. Since then, Mwesa or Mirambo or some other native had been with him. But now he had no guide, and he was seized with a feeling of helplessness. Rain had begun to fall, and the obscure sky could not be read for the points of the compass. Brushwood grew to his knees; thorn bushes threw out tentacles that caught at his clothes and tore his flesh. Dodging obstructions, he sometimes found that he had only worsened his plight, and was forced to tear a way for himself at the cost of bleeding hands. Rarely he came to open spaces; then he quickened his pace, though his wet boots dragged heavily upon his feet. Once, in crossing a grassy glade, he sank over his ankles in morass, and swerved hastily into the bush again, to avoid being engulfed.
Presently, stopping to rest, he thought he heard voices, and hoped that they came from his own men. He dared not call, nor even move towards them, until he was sure whether they were friends or foes. The voices came nearer. At all costs he must learn who the speakers were, and he sprang up into a leafy tree from which he might get a view of the country around. Spying out cautiously through the foliage, he saw a band of men pushing their way up a bush-covered slope not a hundred yards from his perch. Through the heavy rain he could not at first distinguish them; but as they approached he recognised the deserter, Haroun, leading a couple of askaris. Behind them, out of the bush, emerged Reinecke with his arm in a sling, a younger officer by his side, and a line of askaris following in single file. He shrank back into the tree, dreading lest they should pass immediately beneath him and some sharp-eyed man discover him. But they topped the slope some distance away and passed out of sight.
"I have come in the right direction," he thought. "They must be bound for the nullah."
Waiting a little, to make sure that no more of the enemy were coming, he slipped down from the tree, and with infinite caution followed in their track. If this led indeed towards the nullah, he would presently be on ground that he knew, and might circumvent them and arrive first. He felt somewhat perplexed. The Arab Haroun had certainly betrayed him: why, then, had Reinecke set out with no more than thirty or forty men? Had Haroun so little respect for the defences of the nullah as to imagine that they could be stormed by so small a force? Had Reinecke so much contempt for his ability to train the negroes as to believe that forty askaris were more than a match for three times their number as well armed as themselves? He set his lips grimly: if such were their ideas, he would promise them a rough disillusionment.
For some time he followed them up, always with the greatest caution. At length the sound of voices ahead told him that they had halted. He stopped at once. The rain had almost ceased. In a few seconds he heard a rustling and the squelching of boots not far in front of him, and he dived into the bush at the side of the track and watched. Two askaris tramped past him, in the direction from which they had come. They walked unconcernedly: no suspicion of his presence had brought them back. What, then, was their errand?
Reinecke's party was still halted. Tom heard now and then the lower tones of the Germans mingling with the high-pitched voices of the askaris. What were they waiting for? After perhaps twenty minutes voices came from the other direction. The two askaris reappeared, followed by a string of native porters, some carrying what appeared to be the material of a tent; others, boxes and bales of provisions; others, lumps of freshly killed meat. The explanation of the delay flashed upon Tom. The game he had killed had been cut up; the two askaris had been sent back to hasten the march of the porters. "I might have been nabbed," Tom thought.
When the porters joined the waiting askaris, a German voice gave the order to march. After a short interval Tom emerged from his place of concealment and followed. On reaching the spot on which they had halted, he found that it was skirted by a track evidently made not long before--almost certainly the path by which his men had come from the nullah that morning. To his surprise, Reinecke and his party, instead of pursuing this track, as they might have been expected to do if their destination was the nullah, had swerved northward and marched through the pathless scrub.