"Schillingschen's boys will escape and run to the nearest British official with the story!"
"And the British official will be so full of the importance of Schillingschen and the need of protecting his beastly carcass—to say nothing of the everlasting disgrace of letting him be scoughed on British territory—and the official reprimand from home that's sure to follow—that he'll come hot-foot to investigate!"
"We'll have to provide against that," said Fred, and we all laughed, including Coutlass. Talk of provisions is easy when you have no means out of which to provide. It did not occur to include Coutlass in the calculations, or to dismiss him from them; but without exchanging any remarks on the subject it was clear enough to all of us that no such plan could hope to succeed with the Greek at large, at liberty to spoil it. We saw we should have to keep him in our party for the present.
"Don't forget," said Coutlass, more accustomed than we to seizing the strategic points of desperate situations, "that Schillingschen will have his own boys with him from German East."
"I didn't see any with him on the launch," I objected.
"He would never have come without them" Coutlass insisted. "He made them lie below the water-line out of reach of bullets at the only time when you might have seen them! He wouldn't trust himself to British porters. My word, no! That devil knows natives! He knows some of them might be British government spies! He'll have his own boys,—if they can't carry all his loads he'll buy donkeys at Mumias; there are always donkeys to be bought at that place, brought down from Turkana by the Arab ivory traders. Do donkeys talk?"
At any rate, we talked, and made no bones at all about including Georges Coutlass in the conversation. It was his suggestion that we should send natives to look out for Schillingschen, and Fred's amendment that reduced the messengers to one, and that one Kazimoto. Any of the others might decide to desert, once out of sight, and we could scarcely have blamed them, for their path had not lain among roses in our company.
Kazimoto had a million objections to offer against going alone on that errand, as, for instance, that the chigger fleas would invade our toe-nails disastrously without his cunning fingers to hunt them out again. He also prophesied that without him to interpret there would swiftly be trouble between us and the chief; but we saw the other side of that medal and rather looked forward to an interval when the chief should not be able to talk to us at all.
At last, on the second morning after our arrival at the village, Kazimoto wrapped an enormous mound of cold mtama pudding in a cloth and went his way, prophesying darkly of murder and sudden death lurking behind rocks and trees, as unwishful to be alone as a terrier without a master, but much too faithful to refuse duty.
The chief saw a side of the medal that we had not guessed existed. He came and sat beside us like an evil-smelling shadow, satisfied that now we could not dismiss him, he being under no obligation to understand gestures. Curiosity was the impelling motive, but he was not without suspicion. Fred said he reminded him of a Bloomsbury landlady whose lodgers had not paid their board and rooming in advance.