The Leopard Woman Part 2

The Kavirondo, his eyes rolling, shot forth a torrent of language.

"He says," Cazi Moto summarized all this, "that he was very sick, but that this medicine"--indicating the thermometer--"cured him."

"He lies again," said Kingozi. "This is not medicine, but magic that tells me when a man has uttered lies. This man must beware or he will get _kiboko_."

The Kavirondo scuttled away, and Kingozi gave his attention to the second patient. This man had an infected leg that required some minor surgery. When the job was over and Kingozi had washed his hands, he relighted his pipe and sat back in his chair with a sigh of content.

The immediate foreground sank below his consciousness. He stared across the flickering fires at the velvet blackness; listened across the intimate, idle noise of the camp to the voice of the veldt.

For with the fall of darkness and the larger silence of darkness, the veldt awoke. Animals that had dozed through the hot hours and grazed through the cooler hours in somnolent content now quivered alert. There were runnings here and there, the stamp of hoofs, sharp snortings as taut nerves stretched. Zebras uttered the absurd small-dog barks peculiar to them; ostriches boomed; jackals yapped; unknown birds uttered hasty wild calls. Numerous hyenas, near and far away, moaned like lost souls. Kingozi listened as to the voice of an old acquaintance telling familiar things; the men chattered on, their whole attention within the globe of light from their fires.

But suddenly the noise stopped as though it had been cut by a knife.

Total silence fell on the little encampment. The men, their various actions suspended, listened intently. From far away, apparently, a low, vibrating rumble stole out of the night's immensity. It rose and seemed to draw near, growing hollow and great, until the very ground seemed to tremble as though a heavy train were pa.s.sing, or the lower notes of a great organ had been played in a little church. And then it died down, and receded to the great distance again, and was ended by three low, grunting coughs.

The veldt was silent. The zebra barkings were still; the night birds had hushed; the hyenas and jackals and all the other night creatures down--it almost seemed--to the very insects had ceased their calls and cries and chirpings. One might imagine every living creature rigid, alert, listening, as were these men about the little fires.

The tension relaxed. The men dropped more fuel on the fires, coaxing the flame brighter. A whispering comment rose from group to group.

"_Simba! simba! simba!_" they hissed one to the other.

A lion had roared!

CHAPTER III

THE RHINOCEROS

In the first gray dusk Simba and Cazi Moto slipped away on the errands appointed for them--to find people and to find water, if possible. The cook camp, too, was afoot, dark figures pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing before a fire. But the rest of the men slept heavily, seizing the unwonted chance.

When the first rays of the sun struck the fly of the small green master's-tent Kingozi appeared, demanding water wherewith to wash. At the sound of his voice men stirred sleepily, sat up, poked the remains of their tiny fires. As though through an open tap the freshness of night-time drained away. The hot, searching, stifling African day took possession of the world.

After breakfast Kingozi looked about him for shelter. A gorgeous, red-flowering vine had smothered one of the flat-topped thorn trees in its luxuriance. The growths of successive years had overlaid each other. Kingozi called two men with _pangas_ who speedily cut out the centre, leaving a little round green room in the heart of the shadow.

Thither Kingozi caused to be conveyed his chop-box table, his canvas chair, and his tin box; and there he spent the entire morning writing in a blank book and carefully drawing from field notes in a pocketbook a sketch map of the country he had traversed. At noon he ate a light meal of bread, plain rice with sugar, and a _balauri_ of tea. Then for a time he slept beneath the mosquito bar in his tent.

At this hour of fiercest sun the whole world slept with him. From the baked earth rose heat waves almost as tangible as gauze veils. Objects at a greater distance than a hundred yards took on strange distortions.

The thorn trees shot up to great heights; animals stood on stilts; the tops of the hills were flattened, and from their summits often reached out into s.p.a.ce long streamers. Sometimes these latter joined across wide intervals, creating an illusion of natural bridges or lofty flat-topped cliffs with holes clear through them to the open sky beyond. All these things s.h.i.+mmered and flickered and wavered in the mirage of noon. Only the sun itself stared clear and unchanging.

At about two o'clock Kingozi awoke and raised his voice. Mali-ya-bwana, next in command after Cazi Moto and Simba, answered.

"Get the big gun," he was told, "and the water bottles."

Mali-ya-bwana was not a professed gun bearer, but he could load, and Kingozi believed him staunch. Therefore, often, in absence of Simba, the big Baganda had been pressed into this service.

The blasting heat was fiercest at this hour. The air was saturated by it just as water may hold a chemical in solution. Every little while a wave would beat against the cheek as though a furnace door had been opened. Nevertheless Kingozi knew that this was also the hour when the sun's power begins to decline; when the vertical rays begin to give place. For it is not heat that kills, but the actinic power of rays unfiltered by a long slant through the earth's atmosphere.

The two men tramped methodically along, paying little attention to their surroundings. Game dozed everywhere beneath the scanty shade, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in herds.

Motionless they stood; and often, were it not for the switch of a tail, they would have remained un.o.bserved. Even the sentinel hartebeestes, posted atop high ant hills on the outskirts of the herds, seemed half asleep. Nevertheless they were awake enough for the job, as was evidenced when the two human figures came too near. Then a snort brought every creature to its feet, staring.

The objective of the men seemed to be a rise of land which the lessening mirage now permitted to appear as a small kopje, a solitary hill with rocky outcrops. Toward this they plodded methodically: Kingozi slouching ahead, Mali-ya-bwana close at his heels, very proud of his temporary promotion from the ranks. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. At the signal Kingozi stopped and looked back inquiringly over his shoulder.

Mali-ya-bwana was pointing cautiously to a low red clay ant hill immediately in their path and about thirty yards ahead. To the casual glance it looked no different from any of the hundreds of others of like size and colour everywhere to be seen. Kingozi's attention, however, now narrowed to a smaller circle than the casual. It did not need Mali-ya-bwana's whispered "_faru_" (rhinoceros) to identify the mound.

Cautiously the two men began to back away. When they had receded some twenty yards, however, the huge beast leaped to its feet. The rapidity of its movements was extraordinary. There intervened none of the slow and clumsy upheaval one would naturally expect from an animal of so ma.s.sive a body and such short, thick legs. One moment it slumbered, the next it was afoot, warned by some slight sound or jar of the earth or--as some maintain--by a telepathic sense of danger. Certainly, as far as they knew, neither Kingozi nor Mali-ya-bwana had disturbed a pebble or broken a twig.

The rhinoceros faced them, snorting loudly. The sound was exactly that of steam roaring from a locomotive's safety valve. Strangely enough, in spite of the ma.s.sive structure and the loose, thick skin of the beast, it conveyed an impression of taut, nervous muscles. Though it faced directly toward them, the men knew that they were as yet unseen. The rhinoceros' eyesight is very short, or very circ.u.mscribed, or both; and only objects in motion and comparatively close enter its range of vision. Kingozi and his man held themselves rigidly immovable, waiting for what would happen. The rhinoceros, too, held himself rigidly immovable, his nostrils dilating between snorts, his ears turning; for his senses of smell and hearing made up in their keenness for the defects of his eyes.

Suddenly, without the slightest warning, he stuck his tail perpendicular and plunged forward at a clumsy-looking but exceedingly swift gallop.

An inexperienced man would have considered himself the object of a deliberate "charge"; but an old African traveller, such as Kingozi, knew this for a blind rush in the direction toward which the animal happened to be headed. The rhinoceros, alarmed by the first intimation of danger, unable to get further news from its keener senses, had been seized by a panic. Were nothing to deflect him from the straight line, he would continue ahead on it until the panic had run out.

But the two men were exactly in that line!

Kingozi hitched his light rifle forward imperceptibly. Although this was at present only a blind rush, should the rhinoceros catch sight of them he would fight; and within twenty-five yards or so his eyesight would be quite good enough. As the beast did not slow up in the first ten yards, but rather settled into its stride, Kingozi took rapid aim and fired.

His intention was neither to kill nor to cripple his antagonist. If that had been the case, he would have used the heavy double rifle that Mali-ya-bwana held ready near his elbow. The bullet inflicted a slight flesh wound in the outer surface of the beast's left shoulder. Kingozi instantly pa.s.sed the light rifle back with his right hand, at the same motion seizing the double rifle with his left.

But at the _spat_ of the bullet the rhino veered toward the direction from which it seemed to his stupid brain the hurt had come. Tail erect, he thundered away down the slope.

For a hundred yards he careered full speed, then slowed to a trot, finally stopped, whirled, and faced to a new direction. The sound of his blowing came clearly across the intervening distance.

A low bush grew near. The rhino attacked this savagely, horning it, trampling it down. The dust arose in clouds. Then the huge brute trotted slowly away, still snorting angrily, pausing to b.u.t.t violently the larger trees, or to tear into shreds some bush or ant hill that loomed dangerously in the primeval fogs of his brain.

"Sorry, old chap," commented Kingozi in his own language, "but you're none the worse. Only I'm afraid your naturally sweet temper is spoiled for to-day, at least."

He turned to exchange guns with Mali-ya-bwana.

"_N'dio, bwana_," a.s.sented the latter to a speech of which he understood not one word. Mali-ya-bwana was secretly a little proud of himself for having stuck like a gun bearer, instead of s.h.i.+nning up a thorn tree like a porter.

Kingozi slipped a cartridge into the rifle, and the two resumed their walk toward the kopje.

CHAPTER IV

THE STRANGER

By the time the two men had gained the top of the hill the worst heat of the day had pa.s.sed. Kingozi seated himself on a flat rock and at once began to take sights through a prismatic compa.s.s, entering the observations in a pocketbook. Mali-ya-bwana, bolt upright, stared out over the thinly wooded plain below. He reported the result of his scouting in a low voice, to which the white man paid no attention whatever.

"_Twiga[2] bwana_," he said, and then, as his eye caught the flash of many sing-sing horns, "_kuru, mingi_." Thus he named over the different animals--the topi, the red hartebeeste, the eland, zebra, some warthogs, and many others. The beasts were antic.i.p.ating the cool of the afternoon, and were grazing slowly out from beneath the trees, scattering abroad over the landscape.

[Footnote 2: Giraffe.]

From even this slight elevation the outlook extended. Isolated mountain ranges showed loftier; the tops of unguessed hills peeped above the curve of the earth; the clear line of the horizon had receded to the outer confines of terrestrial s.p.a.ce, but even then not far enough to touch the cup of the sky. Elsewhere the heavens meet the horizon: in Africa they lie beyond it, so that when the round, fleecy clouds of the Little Rains sail down the wind there is always a fleet of them beyond the earth disappearing into the immensities of the infinite. There is s.p.a.ce in African skies beyond the experience of those who have dwelt only in other lands. They dwarf the earth; and the plains and mountains, lying in weeks' journeys spread before the eye, dwarf all living things, so that at the last the man of imagination here becomes a humble creature.

For an hour the two remained on top the kopje. The details of the unknown country ahead, toward which Kingozi gave his attention, were simple. From the green line of the watercourse, near which the camp showed white and tiny, the veldt swept away for miles almost unbroken.

Here and there were tiny parklike openings of clear gra.s.s; here and there more kopjes standing isolated and alone, like fortresses. Far down over the edge of the world showed dim and blue the tops of a short range of mountains. Vainly did Kingozi sweep his gla.s.ses over the landscape in hope of another line of green. No watercourse was visible.

On the other hand, the scattered growth of thorn trees showed no signs of thickening to the dense spiky jungle that is one of the terrors of African travel. There might be a watercourse hidden in the folds of the earth; there might be a rainwater "tank," or a spring, on any of the kopjes. Simba and Cazi Moto were both experienced, and capable of a long round trip. The problem of days' journeys was not pressing at this moment. Kingozi noted the compa.s.s bearings of all the kopjes; took back sights in the direction from which he had come; closed his compa.s.s; and began idly to sweep the country with his gla.s.ses. In an unwonted mood of expansion he turned to Mali-ya-bwana.