The subaltern realised it but could give no reason for Bela Moshi's preferential treatment; not that Wilmshurst had gone out of his way to favour the man. He treated the rank and file of his platoon with impartial fairness, ever ready to hear complaints, but woe betide the black who tried to "get to windward" of the young officer.
Upon the approach of the C.O. the ranks stiffened. The display of ivory vanished, and with thick, pouting lips, firmly closed, and eyes fixed rigidly in front the men awaited the minute inspection.
Colonel Quarrier was a man who had grown grey in the service of the Crown. For over thirty years he had held a commission in the Nth West Africa Regiment, rising from a fresh young Second Lieutenant to the rank of Colonel Commandant and ruler of the destinies of nearly a thousand men. "Case hardened" to the attacks of mosquitos, his system overcharged with malarial germs until the scourge of the Coast failed to harm him, Colonel Quarrier possessed one of the principal qualifications for bush-fighting in the Tropics—a "salted" constitution.
Already he had served in four African campaigns, having but recently taken part in the comparatively brief but strenuous Kamarun expedition. He was a past-master in the art of fighting in miasmic jungles, and now he was about to engage in operations on a larger and slightly different scale—bush-fighting in German East, where ranges of temperature are experienced from the icy cold air of the upper ground of Kilimanjaro to the sweltering heat of the low-lying land but a few degrees south of the Line.
The parade over a hoarse order rang out. A drum and bugle band belonging to another regiment struck up a lively air and the black and khaki lines swung about into "column of route."
The "Waffs" were off to the conquest of the last of Germany's ultra-European colonies.
CHAPTER II
CHAOS IN THE CABIN
It was a march of about five miles to the beach along a straight road bordered with palm trees. At some distance from the highway the country was thick with scrub, from which the sickly smell of the mangroves rose in the still slanting rays of the sun.