Another avenue to remorse did Africa close, that fear of discovery and of punishment that leads men to contrition. Murder is so safe in Central Africa. Let me advise you to take your enemies on a shooting trip there. There in the solitude, far from coroners' inquests, are a hundred agents of sudden and silent death—snake-bite, blackwater, a crocodile, sunstroke, a lion ... and a sun that makes immediate burial unavoidable.
Any of these or a dozen other fates could be adduced to explain Dick's disappearance; the natives would ask no questions and carry no tales; and a wife cannot, in English law, give evidence against her husband.
So Africa was accessory after, as well as before, the fact. Archie may not have recognised her proffered help; at the same time he can have felt none of the anxiety and fear that so assist the workings of conscience. He blundered on through the trees, caring only to set space between himself and Norah, until chance brought him on the herd of eland.
His eye, which took in no detail of his course, was caught by the quick movement of a horned head plucking at a branch. The sight of the great antelope focused his vision on the rest of the herd, whose humped bodies were no more than shadows in the dappled gloom of the forest.
Dropping flat, he began to crawl into easy range. No fancy shots, with ammunition so scarce. As he got near, he saw that the animal he stalked was a cow. Cautiously he knelt up and searched among the trees for a bull. He thought involuntarily that, for the second time that day, he had spared the female of the species. He raised his rifle and aimed behind the shoulder of a magnificent bull who stood head up guarding his cows, his horns hidden in the flat branches. With faint surprise he found compunction in his heart. He was loath now to tighten the trigger finger. Half an hour before he had felt no such qualm.
It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull on a line between eye socket and ear hole.
If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were nothing—men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth. Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated, choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing posture.
Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.
The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. Soon the eland was hidden under a mound of foliage, black in the failing light. He kicked a little earth over a pool of blood that might attract a jackal or a hyæna. As he did so, another pool of blood with a woman's skirt trailing in it rose before his eyes, and he realised that what he did for an eland he must do for a man.
Ward must be buried. He could not be left to the ministrations of the forest. Archie's prodigious impersonality had departed and he was conscious of a violent distaste for the work before him. Either his fever or his imagination brought physical sickness, and he sat down on the ground till the nausea passed.