y of hell! It takes more than a
lousy military German to get Georges Coutlass at a loose end! They
must get me dead before that can happen! And then, by Blitzen, as
those devils say, a dead Georges Coutlass will be better than a
thousand dead Germans! In hell I will use them to clean my boots on!
At a loose end, was I? I met this bloody rogue Hassan--the fat
blackguard who told me you have come to Zanzibar for fish--and made an
agreement with him to look for Tippoo Tib's buried ivory. Yes, sir! I
showed him papers. He thought they were money drafts. He thought me a
man of means whom he could bleed. I had guns and ammunition, he none.
He pretended to know where some of Tippoo Tib's ivory is buried."

"Some of it, eh?" said Fred.

"Some of it, d'you say?" said I.

"Some of it, yes. A million tusks. Some say two million! Some say
three! Thunder!--you take a hundred good tusks and bury them; you'll
see the hill you've made from five miles off! A hundred thousand tusks
would make a mountain! If any one buried a million tusks in one spot
they'd mark the place on maps as a watershed! They must be buried
here, there, everywhere along the trail of Tippoo Tib--perhaps a
thousand in one place at the most. Which of you two gentlemen is the
lord?"

"Did Hassan lead you to any of it?" Fred inquired.

"Not he! The jelly-belly! The Arab pig! He led me to Ujiji--that's
on Lake Tanganika--the old slave market where he himself was once sold
for ten cents. I don't doubt a piece of betel nut and a pair of
worn-out shoes had to be thrown in with him at the price! There he
tried to make me pay the expenses in advance of a trip to Usumbora at
the head of the lake. God knows what it would have cost, the way he
wanted me to do it! Are you the lord, sir?"

"What did you do?" asked Fred.

"Do? I parted company! I had made him drunk once. (The Arabs aren't
supposed to drink, so when they do they get talkative and lively!) And
I knew Arabic before ever I crossed the Atlantic--learned it in
Egypt--ran away from a sponge-fishing boat when I was a boy. No, they
don't fish sponges off the Nile Delta, but you can smuggle in a sponge
boat better than in most ships. Anyhow, I learned Arabic. So I
understood what that pig Hassan said when he talked in the dark with
his brother swine. He knew no more than I where the ivory was! He
suspected most of it was in a country called Ruanda that runs pretty
much parallel wit