TO the northwest of the valley of Opar the smoke rose from the cook fires of a camp in which some hundred blacks and six whites were eating their evening meal. The negroes and , together in low tones over their fare, the whites, and , kept their firearms close at hand. One of them, a girl, and the only member of her sex in the party, was addressing her fellows:
“We have Adolph’s stinginess and Esteban’s to thank for the condition in which we are,” she said.
The fat Bluber his shoulder, the big Spaniard .
“For vy,” asked Adolph, “am I to blame?”
“You were too stingy to employ enough carriers. I told you at the time that we ought to have had two hundred blacks in our party, but you wanted to save a little money, and now what is the result? Fifty men carrying eighty pounds of gold apiece and the other carriers are overburdened with camp equipment, while there are scarce enough left for askari to guard us properly. We have to drive them like beasts to make any progress and to keep them from throwing away their loads, and they are fagged out and angry. They don’t require much of an excuse to kill us all on the spot. On top of all this they are underfed. If we could keep their filled we could probably keep them happy and reasonably , but I have learned enough about natives to know that if they are hungry they are neither happy nor contented, even in idleness. If Esteban had not so much about his prowess as a hunter we should have brought enough provisions to last us through, but now, though we are barely started upon our return journey, we are upon less than half .”
“I can’t kill game when there isn’t any game,” the Spaniard.
“There is plenty of game,” said Kraski, the Russian. “We see the tracks of it every day.”
The Spaniard eyed him venomously. “If there is so much game,” he said, “go out and get it yourself.”
“I never claimed to be a hunter,” replied Kraski, “though I could go out with a shot and a pea shooter and do as well as you have.”
The Spaniard leaped to his feet menacingly, and instantly the Russian covered him with a heavy service revolver.
“Cut that business,” cried the girl, sharply, leaping between them.
“Let the blighters fight,” growled John Peebles. “If one of ’em kills the hother there’ll be fewer to split the swag, and ’ere we are ’n that’s that.”
“For vy should ve quarrel?” demanded Bluber. “Dere is enough for all—over forty-tree t’ousand pounds apiece. Ven you get mad at me you call me a dirty Jew und say dat I am stingy, but Mein Gott! you are vorser. You vould kill vun of your friends to get more money. Oi! Oi! tank Gott dat I am not a .”
“Shut up,” growled Throck, “or we’ll have forty-three thousand pounds more to divide.”
Bluber eyed the big Englishman fearfully. “Come, come, Dick,” he , in his oiliest tones, “you vouldn’t get mad at a leedle choke vould you, und me your best friend?”
“I’m sick of all this grousin’,” said Throck. “I h’ain’t no high-brow, I h’ain’t nothin’ but a pug. But I got sense enough to know that ’s the only one in the bloomin’ bunch whose brains wouldn’t around in a peanut shell. John, Bluber, Kraski and me, we’re here because we could raise the money to carry out Flora’s plan. The dago there”—and he indicated Esteban—“because his face and his figure filled the bill. There don’t any of us need no brains for this work, and there ain’t any of us got any more brains than we need. Flora’s the brains of this , and the sooner everyone understands that and takes orders from her, the better off we’ll all be. She’s been to Africa with this Lord Greystoke feller before—you wuz his wife’s maid, wasn’t you, Flora? And she knows somethin’ about the country and the natives and the animals, and there don’t none of us know nuttin’.”
“Throck is right,” said Kraski, quickly, “we’ve been long enough. We haven’t had a boss, and the thing to do is to make Flora boss from now on. If anyone can get us out of this, she can, and from the way those fellows over there are ,” and he nodded toward the blacks, “we’ll be lucky if we ever get out with our skins, let alone taking any of the gold with us.”
“Oil Oi! You don’t mean to leave the gold?” almost Bluber.
“I mean that we do whatever Flora thinks best,” replied Kraski. “If she says to leave the gold, we’ll leave it.”
“That we do,” seconded Throck.
“I’m for it,” said Peebles. “Whatever Flora says goes.”
The Spaniard nodded his .
“The rest of us are all for it, Bluber. How about you?” asked Kraski.
“O vell—sure—if you say so,” said Bluber, “und as John says ‘und here ve ain’t und ’s dat.’ ”
“And now, Flora,” said Peebles, “you’re the big ’un. What you say goes. What’ll we do next?”
“Very well,” said the girl; “we shall camp here until these men are rested, and early tomorrow we’ll start out intelligently and , and get meat for them. With their help we can do it. When they are rested and well fed we will start on again for the coast, moving very slowly, so as not to tire them too much. This is my first plan, but it all hinges upon our ability to get meat. If we do not find it I shall bury the gold here, and we will do our best to reach the coast as quickly as possible. There we shall recruit new porters—twice as many as we have now—and purchase enough provisions to carry us in and out again. As we come back in, we will cache provisions at every camping place for our return trip, thus saving the necessity of carrying heavy loads all the way in and out again. In this way we can come out light, with twice as many porters as we actually need. And by working them in shifts we will travel much faster and there will be no . These are my two plans. I am not asking you what you think of them, because I do not care. You have made me chief, and I am going to run this from now on as I think best.”
“Bully for you,” roared Peebles; “that’s the kind of talk I likes to hear.”
“Tell the head man I want to see him, Carl,” said the girl, turning to Kraski, and a moment later the Russian returned with a burly negro.
“Owaza,” said the girl, as the black halted before her, “we are short of food and the men are burdened with loads twice as heavy as they should carry. Tell them that we shall wait here until they are rested and that tomorrow we shall all go out and hunt for meat. You will send your boys out under three good men, and they will act as beaters and drive the game in to us. In this way we should get plenty of meat, and when the men are rested and well fed we will move on slowly. Where game is we will hunt and rest. Tell them that if they do this and we reach the coast in safety and with all our loads, I shall pay them twice what they agreed to come for.”
“Oi! Oi!” spluttered Bluber, “twice vat dey agreed to come for! Oh, Flora, vy not offer dem ten per cent? Dot vould be fine interest on their money.”
“Shut up, you fool,” snapped Kraski, and Bluber , though he rocked back and , shaking his head in .
The black, who had presented himself for the interview with sullen and scowling , brightened visibly now. “I will tell them,” he said, “and I think that you will have no more trouble.”
“Good,” said Flora, “go and tell them now,” and the black turned and left.
“There,” said the girl, with a sigh of relief, “I believe that we can see light ahead at last.”
“Tvice vat ve promised to pay them!” Bluber, “Oi! Oi!”
Early the following morning they prepared to set out upon the hunt. The blacks were now smiling and happy in of plenty of meat, and as they tramped off into the jungle they were singing gayly. Flora had divided them into three parties, each under a head man, with directions for the position each party was to take in the line of beaters. Others had been to the whites as gun-bearers, while a small party of the askari were left behind to guard the camp. The whites, with the exception of Esteban, were armed with rifles. He alone seemed inclined to question Flora’s authority, insisting that he preferred to hunt with spear and arrows in keeping with the part he was playing. The fact that, though he had hunted assiduously for weeks, yet had never brought in a single kill, was not sufficient to dampen his egotism. So genuinely had he entered his part that he really thought he was Tarzan of the Apes, and with such had he equipped himself in every detail, and such a master of the art of make-up was he, that, in conjunction with his splendid figure and his handsome face that were almost a counterpart of Tarzan’s, it was scarcely to be wondered at that he almost fooled himself as successfully as he had fooled others, for there were men among the carriers who had known the great ape-man, and even these were deceived, though they wondered at the change in him, since in little things he did not himself as Tarzan, and in the matter of kills he was disappointing.
Flora Hawkes, who was endowed with more than a fair share of intelligence, realized that it would not be well to cross any of her companions unnecessarily, and so she permitted Esteban to hunt that morning in his own way, though some of the others a little at her decision.
“What is the difference?” she asked them, after the Spaniard had set out alone. “The chances are that he could use a rifle no better than he uses his spear and arrows. Carl and Dick are really the only shots among us, and it is upon them we depend principally for the success of our hunt today. Esteban’s egotism has been so badly bumped that it is possible that he will go to the last to make a kill today—let us hope that he is successful.”
“I hope he breaks his fool neck,” said Kraski. “He has served our purpose and we would be better off if we were rid of him.”
The girl shook her head negatively. “No,” she said, “we must not think or speak of anything of that kind. We went into this thing together, let us stick together until the end. If you are wishing that one of us is dead, how do you know that others are not wishing that you were dead?”
“I haven’t any doubt but that Miranda wishes I were dead,” replied Kraski. “I never go to bed at night without thinking that the damned greaser may try to stick a knife into me before morning. And it don’t make me feel any kinder toward him to hear you defending him, Flora. You’ve been a bit soft on him from the start.”
“If I have, it’s none of your business,” retorted the girl.
And so they started out upon their hunt, the Russian scowling and angry, harboring thoughts of or worse against Esteban, and Esteban, hunting through the jungle, was occupied with his and his . His dark mind was open to every chance suggestion of a means for putting the other men of the party out of the way, and taking the woman and the gold for himself. He hated them all; in each he saw a possible rival for the affections of Flora, and in the death of each he saw not only one less suitor for the girl’s affections, but forty-three thousand additional pounds to be divided among fewer people. His mind was thus occupied to the of the business of hunting, which should have occupied him , when he came through a patch of heavy underbrush, and stepped into the glaring sunlight of a large clearing, face to face with a party of some fifty magnificent ebon . For just an instant Esteban stood frozen in a of terror, forgetting momentarily the part he was playing—thinking of himself only as a white man in the heart of Africa facing a large band of warlike natives—cannibals, perhaps. It was that moment of utter silence and inaction that saved him, for, as he stood thus before them, the Waziri saw in the silent, figure their beloved lord in a characteristic pose.
“O Bwana, Bwana,” cried one of the warriors, rushing forward, “it is indeed you, Tarzan of the Apes, Lord of the Jungle, whom we had given up as lost. We, your faithful Waziri, have been searching for you, and even now we were about to dare the dangers of Opar, fearing that you might have ventured there without us and had been captured.”
The black, who had at one time accompanied Tarzan to London as a body servant, broken English, an of which he was proud, losing no opportunity to air his before his less fortunate fellows. The fact that it had been he whom fate had chosen to act as spokesman was indeed a fortunate circumstance to Miranda. Although the latter had himself assiduously to mastering the dialect of the west coast carriers, he would have been hard put to it to carry on a conversation with one of them, while he understood nothing of the Waziri tongue. Flora had schooled him carefully and well in the of Tarzan, so that he realized now that he was in the presence of a band of the ape-man’s faithful Waziri. Never before had he seen such magnificent blacks—clean-............