Half an hour before sunset the Athena's anchors broke mud, and with her plimsoll and the red streak of her watermark high up out of the brown wash, she started nosing her way up against the current. The night fell suddenly like the quick closing of shutters, and from the river and the dank vegetation on its banks rose the mist that spelled fever and sickness. There was a ladling out of quinine that night to all hands. Macfarlane took a double dose. This river with its sickening smell of crushed marigolds, where the mangroves threw hideous twisted roots into the slime, and noisome creatures sprawled in the gloom, had a breath of poison.
"I'm hanged if I don't think," said the agent, as he took his second dose of quinine wrapped in a cigarette paper, "that we'd be better off with Da Silva in possession and us at home. I'm homesick. And this is West Africa. My stars! listen to the splashing of that crocodile!"
The skipper swore softly when a little shiver went through the hull. "That's the bottom," he said. "That deep channel may be there, but it takes keeping in. Now, if you take my tip, you'll get those shooters of yours unpacked. Your man may want a few in a hurry. Gosh! there's the bottom again. It'll be no soft thing if we get stuck, either for us or your man." But they went up the waterway in safety till dawn came, when Captain Bingham breathed more freely.
"All the same, I'm not enjoying myself," he said. "The salt sea is a dashed sight more to my liking. How much further is it?"
"We shall strike it this evening," said Macfarlane. "If we had been crows we could have got there in one-third the distance. This river winds about some."
It was the long, roundabout journey that the vessel had to go which enabled the plotter, Da Silva, to get news of her approach, and of the success of his plans, for the native runner, who had in the first place conveyed the letter, forced from Dean, by way of direct forest paths, went back the same way, carrying promise of immediate assistance.
Therefore the half-blood went on with his arrangements. To begin with, he sent runners out to various villages both near and distant, whence fighting men could come. He sent word that for each man there would be a rifle and cartridges, and that the war to regain the black man's country for the black man was ripe to commence. And then he constructed a simple, unsuspicious arrangement for trapping the ship that was nosing her way up the river.
Four hundred yards down from the strip of sun-baked beach in front of the trading factory the river was divided by a lush, swampy island into two channels. The near one was the only practicable way, and this he carefully filled up by dropping a couple of giant cottonwoods from the bank into it. The parts of the trees above the water lopped off till their presence was inconspicuous, and so came about as he intended the catching of the Athena like a jackal in a trap.
Going many miles at half speed, more miles at dead slow, the ocean tramp, making her uncertain way up this muddy channel into the heart of Africa, did not arrive within sight of her destination till close on midnight.
"We're close now," Macfarlane was saying. "Why not give a tootle on our siren just to buck up Dean, and give his enemies a shiver if they are near?"