The next day, early in the morning, we all four loaded our muskets, and asked Aboh if he was ready to accompany us.
“King, he give him leave, him go at once,” he answered.
No sooner did we quit our hut than we saw all the men of the village, fully armed, collected at the outlets, evidently resolved to stop us by force. Although we might have fought our way through them, we could not have done so without bloodshed. Again we resolved to make a virtue of necessity, and remain until we could find a favourable opportunity of escaping.
Several days passed by, and every morning, when we were prepared to set out, we found the village guarded as before. When, however, we left our packs behind us, we were allowed to ramble at perfect freedom. Besides Aboh and Shimbo we found a party always ready to accompany us and act as beaters.
Not wishing it to be supposed that we intended to leave that morning, we quietly returned to our hut, and undoing our knapsacks again went out, simply with our rifles in our hands, as if we intended to have a little shooting before breakfast. We had not gone far when we saw a woman near the shore of the lake apparently hunting about and calling out to some one in tones of distress.
“Who is she? and what is it all about?” I asked Aboh.
“She king’s wife. Go bathe, lose piccaninny.”
We hurried on until we met the poor woman. She then explained that while she was bathing in a sheltered pool she had left her little boy on the bank of the lake to play about and amuse himself, but when she came out of the water she could nowhere find him. Of course it at once occurred to us that a crocodile must have carried him off, but Aboh averred that if such was the case the mother would have heard him cry out. He might have slipped into the water and have been drowned, but that he might possibly be hiding from her, for the sake of playing a trick.
“In that case she will soon find him, I hope,” I observed.
Scarcely had I spoken than I saw a huge crocodile crawling out of the bank not twenty yards from us. The next instant, stooping down its head, it lifted up a little black boy by one of his legs.