elapse before the mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy,
fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with his handkerchief torn
into three pieces bound it up.

There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down with his back to the
tree to wait for dawn.

The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bitterness of being
there with hands willing and able to help, yet helpless. A surgeon is as
useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are
without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied,
but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the
situation.

Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat
watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Felix,
lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping
savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant
rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FEAST OF THE VULTURES

Adams, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a whoop from Felix.

It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had
sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the
land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who
had fled westward, and who, with Felix, were all that remained of
Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there----

Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts and kites were
holding a clamorous meeting; over there, where the ground was black with
birds.

The two wretches approaching the camping place rolled their eyes in
terror, glancing over there. They had run for miles and hidden themselves
in a donga. They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and
trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, torn to pieces,
trampled to pulp; they had heard the thunder of the vanishing herd, and
they had listened to the awful silence that followed, lying on their
faces, clinging to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With
day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the camp.

"Hi yi!" yelled Felix, and a response came like the cry of a seagull. They
were shivering as dogs shiver when ill or frightened; their teeth were
chattering, and they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their
skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on their necks and
ank