"It's all right when we catch Fritz sitting," remarked Spofforth. "The trouble is that he strongly objects to be caught. We'll have to chase him from the Rovuma to Kilimanjaro and back before we square up this business."
"And, even then, corner him in Cape Town," added Danvers facetiously. "I can see myself spending my seventieth birthday on this job."
CHAPTER XIII
THE FUGITIVE
On the evening of the capture of M'ganga a white man, fatigued and desperately hungry, stood irresolute upon the banks of the Kiwa River, roughly forty miles from the scene of the Waffs' successful operations.
It would have been a difficult matter to recognise in the jaded man the once well-set-up individual known in certain quarters as Robert MacGregor; nor was there much resemblance between the fugitive and the German secret service agent, Ulrich von Gobendorff—yet the man was none other than he whom the officers of the Haussa regiment particularly wished to lay by the heels.
By a series of hair-breadth escapes von Gobendorff had succeeded in making his way past the Pathan infantry picquets. For twenty minutes he had crouched up to his neck in the miasmatic waters of a forest pool, with thousands of mosquitoes buzzing round his unprotected head, while a patrol of the Rhodesian Light Horse halted within twenty yards of his place of concealment.
And now, with a strip of linen tied round his head, a ragged cotton shirt, a pair of "shorts" that were hardly any protection from the thorny cacti, and a pair of badly-worn "veldt schoen" as the sum total of his clothing and footgear von Gobendorff awaited the fall of night in the depths of a tropical forest.
His limbs were covered with scratches that were causing him intense pain and irritation; his face was swollen under the attacks of mosquitoes, until his bloodshot eyes were hardly visible above his puffed up cheeks. Unarmed with the exception of an automatic pistol, he was about to brave the dangers of a night 'midst malarial mists and wild beasts of an African forest.