e your partner, gentlemen, and if he travels within a hundred
miles of this I will crawl into that Schillingschen's tent in the night
and slit his throat! I would murder him as willingly as I eat when I
am hungry!"

"Your job has been assigned you!" answered Fred. "When Mr. Brown's
cattle are back in Lumbwa perhaps we'll give you something else to do!"

Nevertheless, Coutlass had outlined in a flash the limits of the plan.
We would draw the line at murdering even Schillingschen, but must help
ourselves to his outfit as our only chance of re-outfitting without
betraying our presence in British East. But the plan was not without
rat-holes in it that a fool could see.

"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 conversa