The Sign of the Spider

by Bertram Mitford

  CHAPTER XIII.

  THE MAN HUNTERS.

  For some three hours the party moves forward through the forest shades.Then a halt is called, and, sentinels having been posted, soon the smokeof bivouac fires ascends, and the clatter of cooking utensils mingleswith the hum of many voices.

  The place selected is an open glade or clearing, overhung on one side byhoary masses of rock. The slave-hunters, as we have said, are dividedinto two sections, one consisting of negroid Arabs and Wa-Swahili,believers in the Prophet mostly, and clad in array once gaudy but nowsoiled and tarnished, some few, however, wearing the white haik andburnous; the other of Wangoni, stalwart, martial savages, believers innothing and clad in not much more. These form camps apart, for at hearteach section despises the other, though for purposes of self-interesttemporarily welded. A few, but very few, are Arabs of pure blood.

  One of these is now engaged in converse with the leader of the party. Heis a tall, dignified, keen-faced man, with eyes as piercing as those ofa hawk, and his speech is sparing. But if his words are few his deedsare many, and the name of Lutali--which, however, he makes no secret isnot his real name--is known and feared at least as far and asthoroughly as that of the chief of the slavers himself.

  For the latter, one glance at him is sufficient to show that if ever manwas born to rule with firm but judicious hand such a gang ofbloodthirsty freebooters it is this one. The vigour of his powerfulframe is apparent with every movement, and the strength and fixity ofwill expressed in his keen dark face there is no mistaking. But theblack, piercing eyes and bronzed features belong to no Arab, no halfcaste. He is a white man, a European.

  Stay! To be accurate, there is just a strain of Arab in him; faint,indeed, as of several generations intervening, yet real enough toqualify him for mysterious rites of blood brotherhood with some of themost powerful chiefs from Tanganyika to Khartoum. And throughout theCongo territory, and many an equatorial tribe beyond, this man's namehas been known and feared. No leader of slave-hunters can come near himfor bold and wide-sweeping raids, the terror and unexpectedness ofwhich, together with the complete and ruthless fixity of purposewherewith the objects of them, however strong, however alert, are struckand promptly subjugated, have gained for him among his followers andallies the sobriquet of El Khanac, "The Strangler." But thereader--together with Johannesburg at large--knows him under anothername, and that is "Pirate" Hazon.

  "Is it prudent, think you, Lutali?" he is saying. "Consider. TheseWajalu are a trifle too near the land of the Ba-gcatya. Indeed, weourselves are too near it now, and a day's journey or more in the samedirection is it not to run our heads into the jaws of the lion?"

  "Allah is great, my brother," replies the Arab, with a shrug of theshoulders. "But I would ask, what have we, in our numbers and with armssuch as these," gripping significantly his Express rifle, "to fear fromthose devil-worshippers armed with spears and shields--yea, even thewhole nation of them?"

  "Yet I have seen an army of the nation of which those'devil-worshippers' are sprung, armed only with spears and shields, eatup a force three times as large as our own and infinitely better armed,I being one of the few who escaped. And 'The People of the Spider'cannot, from all accounts, be inferior to the stock whence they came."

  Lutali shrugs his shoulders again.

  "It may be so," he says, "yet there is a large village of these Wajaluwhich would prove an easy capture and would complete the number weneed."

  "Then let us chance it," is Hazon's rejoinder.

  The Arab makes a murmur of assent and stalks away to his own people,while Hazon returns to where he has left his white colleague.

  "Well, Holmes, according to Lutali, they are bent on risking it," hebegins, throwing himself upon a rug and proceeding to fill a pipe.

  "Are they? I'm not altogether glad, yet if it tends towards hurrying usout of this butchery line of business I'm not altogether sorry. I thinkI hate it more and more every day."

  "It isn't a bad line of business, Holmes," returns Hazon, completelyignoring the smothered reproachfulness, resentment even, underlying thetone and reply. "Come, now, you've made a goodish bit of money the shorttime you have been at it. Anyhow, I want to know in what other you wouldhave made anything like as much in the time. Not in fooling with thoserotten swindling stocks at the Rand, for instance?"

  "Maybe not. But we haven't realized yet. In other words, we are not safeout of the wood yet, Hazon, and so it's too soon to hulloa. I don'tbelieve we are going to get off so easily," he adds.

  "Are you going to get on your croaking horse again, and threaten us with'judgments' and 'curses,' and all that sort of thing?" rejoins theother, with a good-humoured laugh. "Why, man, we arephilanthropists--real philanthropists. And I never heard of 'judgments'and 'curses' being showered upon such."

  "Philanthropists, are we? That's a good idea. But where, by the way,does the philanthropy come in?"

  "Why, just here." Then, impressively, "Listen, now, Holmes. Carry yourmind back to all the sights you have seen since we came up the Lualabauntil now. Have you forgotten that round dozen of niggers we happenedon, buried in the ground up to their necks, and when we had dug up onefellow we found we had taken a lot of trouble for nothing because he'dgot his arms and legs broken. The same held good of all the others,except that some were mutilated as well. You remember how sick it madeyou coming upon those heads in the half darkness; or those quarters ofa human body swinging from branches, to which their owner had beenspliced so that, in springing back, the boughs should drag him asunder,as in fact they did? Or the sight of people feeding on the flesh oftheir own blood relations, and many and many another spectacle no moreamusing? Well, then, these barbarities were practised by no wickedslave-raiders, mind, but by the 'quiet, harmless' people upon eachother. And they are of every-day occurrence. Well, then, in capturingthese gentle souls, and deporting them--for a price--whither they willperforce be taught better manners, we are acting the part of realphilanthropists. Do you catch on?"

  "What of those we kill? Those Wangoni brutes are never happy unlesskilling."

  "That is inevitable and is the law of life, which is always hard. And,as Lutali would say, who may fight against his destiny? Not that I meanto say we embarked in this business from motives of philanthropy, friendHolmes; I only cite the argument as one to quiet that singularlyinconvenient conscience of yours. We did so, Stanninghame and I, at anyrate, to make money--quickly, and plenty of it; and I'm not sureStanninghame doesn't need it more than you and I put together."

  "By-the-by, I wonder what on earth has become of Stanninghame all thistime?" said Holmes, apparently glad to quit an unprofitable subject.

  "So do I. He ought to have joined us by now. He is just a triflefoolhardy, is Stanninghame, in knocking about so far afield alone," anda shade of anxiety steals over the speaker's face.

  Holmes makes no reply, and for a while lies back on his rug, puffingaway at his pipe and busy with his thoughts. These are not altogetherpleasant. The process which had transformed the fine, open-natured,wholesome-hearted young Englishman into a slave-hunter, the confederateof ruthless cut-throats and desperadoes, had, in truth, been such as toengender the reverse of pleasant thoughts. Yet, that he had come to thiswas rather the fault of circumstances than the fault of Holmes. He hadenjoyed the big game shooting and the ivory trading of the earlier stageof the trip, the more so from the consciousness that there was profit inboth; and when a large caravan of the above and other legitimatemerchandise had been run down to the coast, he had steadfastly refusedto take the opportunity of parting company with the others. Then whenthey had pushed farther into the equatorial regions, and, joining withLutali, had embarked on their present enterprise, all opportunity ofwithdrawing had gone. The precise point at which he had cast in his lotwith this, Holmes could not with certainty define. Yet there were timeswhen he thought he could. He had relieved his conscience with indignant,passionate protest, when first his eyes became fairly opened to the realnature of the enterprise; and
then had supervened that terrible bout ofmalarial fever, his tardy recovery from which he owed entirely to thecare and nursing of both Hazon and Stanninghame. But it left him for along time weakened in mind and will no less than in body, and what couldhe do but succumb to the inevitable? Yet he had never entered into thesinister undertaking with the whole-heartedness of his twoconscienceless confederates, and of this the latter were aware.

  However, of his scruples they were tolerant enough. He was brimful ofpluck, and seemed to enjoy the situation when they were attacked byoverwhelming odds and had to fight hard and fiercely, such as befellmore than once. And they would insidiously lay salve to his misgivingsby such arguments as we have just heard Hazon adduce, or by remindinghim of the fortune they were making, or even of the physical advantagehe was deriving from the trip.

  The latter, indeed, was a fact. The life in the open, the varyingclimates, frequent and inevitable hardships and never-absent peril, hadmade their mark upon Holmes. Once recovered from his attack, he began toput on flesh and muscle, and his eyes were clear and bright with thatkeen alertness which is the result of peril as a constant companion. Inshort, as they said, he looked twice the man he had done when loungingaround the Stock Exchange or the liquor bars of Johannesburg.

  Through the hot hours of noontide the raiders lie at their ease. Manyare asleep, others conversing in drowsy tones, smoking or chewingtobacco. The Wangoni divide their time about equally between takingsnuff and jeering at and teasing the unfortunate captives. These,crouching on the ground, relieved during the halt of their heavy forkedyokes, endure it all with the stoicism of the most practical phase ofhumanity--the savage. No good is to be got out of bewailing their lot,therefore they do not bewail it; moreover, belonging to a savage race,and far from the highest type of the same, they have no thought of thefuture, and are thus spared the discomfort and anxiety of speculating asto what it may contain for them. Indeed, their chief anxiety at thismoment is that of food, of which they would fain have more, and gazewith wistful eyes upon their captors, who are feasting on the remnant ofwhat was until lately their own property. But the latter jeeringlysuggest to them the expediency of their devouring each other, since theyseem to have a preference for such diet.

  Then, as the sun's rays abate somewhat in fierceness, the temporary campis struck. Bearers take up their loads, fighters look to their arms, thesoiled and gaudy finery of the semi-civilized sons of the Prophetcontrasting with the shining skins of the naked Wangoni, even as theWinchester and Snider rifles and great sheath-knives and revolvers ofthe first do with the broad spears and tufted hide shields of thelatter. And with the files of dejected-looking slaves, yoked together intheir heavy wooden forks, or chained only, the whole caravan, numberingnow some six hundred souls, moves onward.

  But in the mind of the principal of the two white leaders, as he tracesa cipher on the scene of their recent halt, and in that of the other,who watches him, is present, now with deepening anxiety, the samethought, the same speculation: What has become of the third?