Johnny nodded.
“I never forgot how he looked, Johnny.”
“So you carried the girl away and that was all of it?” Johnny relaxed.
“No.” Once more Pant was on the prowl. Springing to his feet, he wandered like a cat looking for a mouse all over the place. Then he came back and sat down. “That,” he went on, “was only the beginning. You’d be surprised, Johnny, you really would. Perhaps—” he spoke slowly, “perhaps, you won’t believe the rest of it. I—I guess I better not tell you. It’s too—”
“No! No!” Johnny’s voice rose. “Go on. Tell it all!”
“It wasn’t easy—” Pant went on at last in a slow drawl, “to find the way back over the way we came, in fact, it was impossible. I tried to remember the way we had come. But you know the jungle, Johnny, vines that trip you and thorny bushes that turn you back. Rough and rugged it was too, great rocks here and deep ravines there.
“The girl found it difficult to walk, she’d been bound for hours. I helped her along until she showed me she could go it alone.
“Strange sort of girl, that one, Johnny. Never said a word—just marched straight on behind me. Perhaps she didn’t know my language. Quite surely she didn’t. Think of the languages spoken in Africa—French, Dutch, Italian, German, and all the black lingos.
“We marched on for hours,” Pant heaved a heavy sigh. “All the time I was looking for the way back. I found a river I’d seen. Then, in passing around a rocky barrier, I lost it. All I could do was to make sure we were going down, not up. That would take us toward valleys. What valleys? Who could tell?
“All the time I was thinking of the girl. Was she all white or only one of those white-blacks they call albino. And what did she think of me? Perhaps she thought me one more slave trader who had stolen her from this big fellow with the hooked nose.