ecause none of our men were
familiar with Schillingschen's loads, and the captured ten, even when
we loosed their hands and treated them friendly, showed no disposition
to be useful. We gave them a load apiece to carry, but to every one we
had to assign two of our own as guards, so that, what with having lost
the fifteen donkeys, we had not a man to spare.

It was after midday when we got off at last. We had not left the camp
more than half a mile behind when I looked back and saw Schillingschen
where his great tent had stood, cavorting on hands and feet like an
enormous dog-baboon, searching every inch of the ground for anything we
might have left. We three stood and watched him for half an hour,
sweating with fear lest he chance on the place where his diary lay
buried in the tin box. We began to wish we had brought it with us. I
said we had done foolishly to leave it, although I had approved of
Fred's burying it at the time.

"Suppose," I argued, "he sets the natives of that village to searching!
What's to prevent him? You know the kind of job they'd make of
it--blade by blade of grass--pebble by pebble. Where they found a
trace of loosened dirt they'd dig."

"Did you bury something, then?" inquired a voice we knew too well. "By
the ace of stinks, those natives can smell out anything a white man
ever touched!"

We turned and faced Coutlass, whom we had imagined on ahead with the
safari. If he noticed our sour looks, he saw fit to ignore them; but
he took an upperhanded, new, insolent way with us, no doubt due to our
refusal to shoot Schillingschen. He ascribed that to a yellow streak.

"I was right. Gassharamminy! I could have sworn I saw two of you on
watch while the third man dug among the stones! What did you bury? I
came back to talk about Brown. The poor drunkard wants to head more to
the east. I say straight on. What do you say?"

We told him to go forward. Then we looked in one another's eyes, and
said nothing. Whether or not the original decision had been wise,
there was no question now what was the proper course.

Instead of tiring out Schillingschen we made an early camp by a
watercourse, and built a very big protection for the donkeys against
lions--a high thorn enclosure, and an outer one not so high, with a
space between them wide enough for the two tents and half a dozen big
fires. Before dark we had enough fuel stacked up to keep the fires
blazing well all night long.

Neit