Zero the Slaver: A Romance of Equatorial Africa

by Lawrence Fletcher

  CHAPTER THREE.

  "BLACK IVORY."

  Having arranged to recommence their search at dawn of day, our friendsturned in to rest that night, leaving one of their Zanzibaris on guard.This man had thus far shown himself fairly reliable, and being a verygreat coward, had proved a most excellent watchman, seldom failing toalarm the camp, at least once every night, with the fearsome news thatbloodthirsty foes, in some shape or form, were close upon them, theattacking force, nine times out of ten, existing only in his fertileimagination, and turning out to be either hungry and inquisitive beastsof prey, or the grey mists of early dawn rising to greet the sun.

  These constant scares had naturally had the effect of inclining everyonein the camp to cry "Wolf!" turn over in his blanket, and, after roundlyanathematising the alarmist, to go comfortably to sleep again; but whenKenyon was roused by this man on the night in question, a single glanceconvinced him that the fellow was, at all events, in desperate earnest,for his knees knocked together, and his face was fairly grey with thehorror of some new and unexplained phenomenon, as he stammered out hisstatement to the effect that several hundred men were silently creepingupon their position, under cover of the mist, and asserting that hecould see them sufficiently clearly to count their numbers by themoonlight.

  "Let my master," he said, "open his white eyes as clear as crystal, andsee my tongue, for there is no lie upon it." Picking up his rifle,Kenyon roused Leigh, the pair quickly following the watchman outside thetent, and this was what they saw.

  Slightly to their right, and entering ghost-like the suspected mountaingorge, was a long train of human beings moving silently, yet swiftly,westwards.

  The camp was completely shrouded in mist, and altogether invisible tothese people passing it within stone's-throw, but its occupants by lyingdown could see tolerably well beneath the thick grey curtain, whichoverhung them in every direction, and it did not require a second glanceto satisfy the Europeans that the spectacle they were watching wassimply an African slave caravan, of unusually large dimensions, on themarch. For some minutes the pair gazed in silence, and then with afierce but subdued ejaculation, Leigh endeavoured to spring to his feet,but was held still by the iron hand of the detective.

  "Down! man, down! for your life!" he whispered. "The game is only justbeginning."

  "But curse it all," growled Leigh, "don't you see that _most of theslaves are white, and that many of them are women_?"

  "I see it all," was the answer, in a stern incisive whisper, "but I seelittle beyond what I expected to see when we arrived here a month ago.Just wait a while, and if I know anything of my work, these people willlead us to your cousin. If we follow them to their destination, there Iam convinced shall we find Richard Grenville, if he be still in the landof the living."

  For fully half an hour did the wretched troop continue to file past, andthen captives, white and black, male and female, together with theircountless guards, were engulfed in the eerie shadows of the rocky gorge,and entirely lost to human ken. Not a sound had the anxious watchersheard from first to last, and when the hindmost figure vanished fromsight, Leigh could not refrain from rubbing his eyes to see if he werereally awake and not dreaming; then, becoming satisfied that the formerwas the case, he seized his rifle, turned eagerly to Kenyon, and beggedhim to get on the trail of these nocturnal wanderers without anothermoment's delay.

  Here, again, however, Leigh's fiery impetuosity was confronted by thestubborn coolness of the American, that worthy absolutely refusing tomake any movement for at least another hour.

  "No, thank you, Leigh," he said; "if yonder poor creatures are captivesto the man who I firmly believe has them in his grip, all I say is justlook out for squalls. You may take my word for it that before you gotyour foot inside the pass you would be simply riddled with bullets. Idare stake my reputation that there are not less than a score of scoutsoutlying all around us, and we have to thank this very substantial veilof mist for saving our lives, for the moment, at all events. In anotherhour the entire crowd will have got some way through the gorge, and thenthe scouts will draw in, and give us a chance of moving, but it would besheer madness on our part to stir from our present position beforedawn."

  "Wherever can those blackguards possibly have laid hands on the dozensof white men and women we saw in the caravan?" asked Leigh.

  "Ah! now you are making a great mistake," replied Kenyon. "There wereat most only half-a-dozen white men amongst the captives, and I saw butone white woman; the rest were unfortunate creatures from one of thenative tribes south of the Great Lakes, and whose habit it is to plastertheir bodies with grey ashes. The first glance under this misty-lookingmoon deceived me, too, but I can reassure you on that score. Therewere, quite half-a-dozen white men amongst them, though, and as for thewhite woman, the less said about her the better, for _she was one of theslave-drivers_. I think, however, Leigh, that you are missing the mainpoint offered to us in this affair. Don't you see that by all the lawsof reason and common-sense this caravan should be steering due east forthe seaboard, and here we find slaves obviously imported from a distance(for I never heard of the grey ash colouring being practised anywhere inthis latitude) _being driven due west_. Now, if you will take your mapfor what it is worth, or will question any of these frauds of ourscalled `Guides,' you will find that there is no town of any kind in thisvicinity, nothing, indeed, of any note at all within hundreds of miles,so far as is known, let alone any such thing as a slave market.Whither, then, can this immense caravan possibly be going?

  "Another point that impressed itself upon my notice was the fact thatthe slave-drive was composed entirely of full-grown men and women (itpositively did not contain one single youth or child), all of whichlooks as if the strongest slaves had been purposely selected for severelabour of some kind in the interior, far or near, their ultimatedestination and precise occupation being what we have to find out."

  "Give me to understand your whole theory, Kenyon, and why you connectthese people with my cousin," said Leigh.

  "No!" was the curt reply. "I have no theory; at least, I have as yetonly the very faintest suspicion of one, and the possibilities before usare far too vast for me at present to hazard even the remotest guess ateither the final result of all this, or whither our investigations willultimately lead us; only I believe, nay, I am morally certain, that infollowing yonder caravan--if follow it we can--we shall be treading inthe steps taken voluntarily by the remnant of the Mormons who escapedfrom Grenville's vengeance in East Utah, and who were, I am equallysure, succeeded at a later date by your cousin, and probably by many ofhis Zulu friends, as part and parcel of just such a slave caravan as wehave seen to-night. And now let us stop talking and get to work at somefood, for the light is beginning to grow, and in half-an-hour's time weought to be ready to move. I have slipped two of our fellows into thelong grass with orders to keep their wits about them, but I expect thecowards will lie so close for the sake of their own precious skins thatthey will see nothing, however much there may be for them to observe."

  "Ay!" said Leigh, bitterly, "I wish we had a handful of our old Zuluallies here and we would make it very warm for the slavers; but as forthese wretched curs, they are not worth their salt, except to carryloads, which they will throw to the deuce at the veriest shadow ofapproaching danger."

  As soon as the sun had fairly risen and sucked up the mist, the camp wasstruck, and the entire party entered the rocky defile and proceeded tothread its dark avenues with the utmost caution, all of which, however,seemed totally unnecessary, as they nowhere saw the slightest sign oflife, or the remotest indication that the stony way had ever before beentrodden by the foot of man.

  One thing, nevertheless, struck the Europeans as being most singular,and this was the fact that when they had penetrated a very considerableway through the gorge, and arrived at the spot where Leigh's unfortunateaccident had occurred, they discovered the roadway to be absolutelyclosed by the fallen tree which had so staunchly stood their friend on
the occasion of their previous visit, and which was still firmly jammedendwise across the narrow rugged path.

  This obstruction was very carefully examined, but it bore no traces ofhaving been tampered with in any shape or form, nor was there theslightest mark upon it which would lead even the most suspicious tobelieve that the obstacle had been climbed over by either man or beast.

  Kenyon at last decided that it would be best for them to mount the logand proceed on their way, arguing that if the people they sought werereally concealed anywhere in the kloof--which certainly did not appearto offer even sufficient cover for a fox--they must be on the watch, andany attempt to return and investigate would be the signal for instantdestruction, whilst if their party, on the other hand, passed quietlyonwards, the slavers would probably conclude that it was composed ofexplorers and was best left alone, knowing what an awkward habit Englandhas, during her spasms of activity, of beating up the world at large forher missing scientific men.

  This course was accordingly adopted, on the principle of choosing theleast of two evils, and before night fell, the party had left the dismalgorge behind them, and were sitting comfortably round their camp fire,after having taken the precaution to post two scouts near the exit ofthe kloof, with instructions that, should anything suspicious occur, oneof them was instantly to come into camp with the news. All, however,remained perfectly quiet, and the night passed without an alarm of anykind, even the ultra-particular night-watchman failing for once todiscover so much as the shadow of one of his customary nocturnalhorrors.

  Thus did Leigh and his astute comrade for the second time miss thesecret of the place, or, as it is known amongst the scattered nativetribes, the "Black Pass of the Dark Spirit of Evil."

  For hours that evening did Leigh and Kenyon discuss the question of themysterious disappearance of the slave caravan, for that those whocomposed it had not penetrated as far as their own present position theyhad quite satisfied themselves before pitching their tent for the night.

  The outer, or western end of the rocky defile debouched upon highlandsof soft spongy turf, and this nowhere bore the slightest impress of ahuman foot, which it would most certainly have done had anyone crossedit recently; indeed, had the "slave-drive" passed that way, the wholeplace would have been paddled like a sheep pen.

  "You may well cudgel your brains, Leigh," said Kenyon, after hours ofprofitless arguing on the following night, "for those fellows never leftthe kloof either by this end or the other after they once entered it.Tell me, Leigh," he continued, venturing a question, which, hardenedman-hunter that he was, had scores of times trembled upon the tip of histongue in the past few months, and had yet remained unasked--"tell me,have you no clue, no idea, and absolutely no theory as to who wasresponsible for the murder of your wife and child? for foully murdered Iam quite convinced they were."

  Vitally important as the query was, Kenyon would have given all hepossessed could he have withdrawn the words ere they were well spoken,for the fearful anguish depicted in the countenance of his friend gavehim, for but one second as it were, a fleeting glimpse of the agony ofsoul in which this strong man lived from day-to-day, and from hour tohour. The misery of expression was awful, but a glance infinitely lesskeen than that of the skilled detective would have noted, with a wealthof pity, that it was a misery which had never learned to say "Thy willbe done."

  For full five minutes did Leigh hide his face in his hands and give noanswering sign, and it was the detective who had once again to break thedread silence.

  "Forgive me," he said, "old friend, if I have torn the quivering woundanew, and believe me when I say that not idle curiosity, but direnecessity, as I conceived it, on behalf of the living, could have mademe touch upon the hallowed subject of the loved but unavenged dead."And he rose to walk away.

  Quickly Leigh raised his face, lined, as it seemed to his friend, in oneshort five minutes with a whole lifetime of keenest suffering.

  "Stop, Kenyon," he said hoarsely, "and excuse my want of self-control.You are right, the loved and unforgotten dead are passed from us for aseason, peace be with them! Now let us see what we can do to pay ourdebts--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, ay, and _blood forblood_! See here," and he laughed a discordant laugh, which wrungKenyon's very soul by the pitiful wail with which it closed, as thestrong man broke down and sobbed in a bitter agony of keen remembrance."See here," he said, as he again pulled himself together, and opened theback of his watch, from which he extracted a small scrap of paper, "theyfound this pinned to the coverlid of my darling's bed."

  The detective reached over and took the paper, but before looking at ithe poured out, and insisted upon Leigh drinking, a stiff glass ofbrandy, for he saw that his friend was completely unhinged.

  This done, he turned his whole attention to the morsel of paper lying inhis hand, and this was what he saw. Simply a small white sheet with acircular, dead black line drawn thus upon it:--

  Pinned on a dead woman's breast, what did this senseless hieroglyphicmean?

  To doctors and detectives, _nothing_!

  To the bereaved and desperate husband, _nothing_!!

  To Stanforth Kenyon, the wily American detective, _nothing_!!!

  "_Nothing_!" gentle reader, just that, and no more.

  One glance he gave--but one; then, springing to his feet, fairlypalpitating with excitement, he almost screamed, "I knew it, I knew it.Zero! Zero! by the Living God!" and as if it were a sombre echo of hiswords, a rifle spirted its vivid jet of flame from the outer gloombeyond the camp fire, and one of the native guides sitting just behindKenyon sprang into the air with a bullet through his brain, and fell tothe ground a corpse.

  Instantly the whole party sought cover, but no further attempt of anykind was made to molest them, and when morning dawned they could nowherefind a trace of the dastard who had fired the fatal shot, and all thatremained for them to do was to bury the body of their poor, unoffendingservant, and choose out a safer camping ground where they might,perhaps, obtain immunity from such unpleasant nocturnal visitors.

  Through the livelong night the thoughts of both Leigh and Kenyon had, asmay well be imagined, been very busy; but whilst Leigh was entirelyabsorbed in the one idea of avenging his murdered wife and child, thepurposes of the American went deeper. He, too, had a righteous act ofretribution to perform, but he had also first, in the execution of hisduty, to find Grenville alive, and release him, if it could be done; andthen, again, vengeance, according to his idea, would not be consummatedby a bullet wound or a spear-thrust: he simply yearned to get his hatedenemy in his clutches, and to make him ignominiously expiate thecountless crimes of his villainous life under the hands of the publicexecutioner, but feared that such a triumph would be utterlyunobtainable, for, setting aside all other considerations, and glancingat Leigh's stern, set countenance, Kenyon felt that the common enemywould receive but short shrift so far as the Englishman was concerned ifonce he fell into the power of the little band.

  Clearly, however, it was little use as yet planning the cooking of ahare which appeared much more likely to catch them than to allow thereverse to happen, and until they knew how and where the enemy wasposted it was absolutely necessary to exercise the greatest discretion,which, in vulgar parlance, meant "making themselves scarce," which theyaccordingly did without further loss of time, giving the place leg-bail,and putting five-and-twenty miles between themselves and the kloof erethey again halted for the night.