ory.

Having detached and sent off our scouts--who, besides being picked men,
travelled without any other encumbrance than their arms--we resumed our
journey homeward, and reached the village not long after sunrise, to the
immense surprise of Jambai, who could scarcely believe that we had
routed the enemy so completely, and whose scepticism was further
increased by the total, and to him unaccountable, absence of prisoners,
or of any other trophies of our success in the fight. But Jack made a
public speech, of such an elaborate, deeply mysterious, and totally
incomprehensible character, that even Makarooroo, who translated,
listened and spoke with the deepest reverence and wonder; and when he
had concluded, there was evidently a firm impression on the minds of the
natives that this victory was--by some means or in some way or other
quite inexplicable but highly satisfactory--the greatest they had ever
achieved.

The king at once agreed to Jack's proposal that a grand pursuit should
take place, to commence the instant news should be brought in by the
scouts. But the news, when it did come, had the effect of totally
altering our plans.

The first scout who returned told us that he had fallen in with a large
body of the enemy encamped on the margin of a small pond. Creeping like
a snake through the grass, he succeeded in getting near enough to
overhear the conversation, from which he gathered two important pieces
of information--namely, that they meant to return to their own lands in
a north-easterly direction, and that their prisoners had escaped by
means of a canoe which they found on the banks of the river that flowed
past King Jambai's village.

The first piece of information decided the king to assemble his
followers, and go off in pursuit of them at once; the second piece of
news determined us to obtain a canoe and follow Mbango and his
companions to the sea-coast, whither, from all that we heard, we
concluded they must certainly have gone. As this, however, was a
journey of many weeks, we had to take the matter into serious
consideration.

"It is quite evident," said Jack, as we sat over our supper on the night
after receiving the above news--"it is quite evident that they mean to
go to the coast, for Mbango had often expressed to Mak a wish to go
there; and the mere fact of their having been seen to escape and take
down stream, is in itself pretty strong evidence that they did not mean
to return to their