Kitabı oku: «Clutterbuck's Treasure», sayfa 4

CHAPTER X
A SERIOUS CHECK

As I did so there was a scuffle and a yelp a few yards away, by a bush, and in the light that the fire shot suddenly around I distinctly caught sight of a brute which I believe was a hyena.

After this I lay with my revolver in my hand, determined that if any savage brute became bold enough again to venture within sight of me I would let fly at him, at the risk of frightening poor slumbering Jack out of his wits. Better that than to have a loathsome hyena or jackal come nibbling at one's leg while one lay asleep. A single shot would probably ensure quiet for the rest of the night.

Before my watch was over I did catch sight of another beast, or rather, I suppose, of the same one. I raised my revolver and pulled the trigger. The weapon misfired.

The "click" of the hammer was sufficient to scare my friend away for the time being; but it was not pleasant to think that our ammunition was not to be relied upon, and I determined to overhaul the stock in the morning. Meanwhile, I changed the cartridges in my revolver, for the little weapon had been loaded ever since leaving England, and it was possible that these were damp.

What if some brute had really attacked us, or—which was at least as likely—if the Strongs had crept up and fallen upon us, and our safety had depended upon this cartridge which had misfired? Ugh! I lay a while and reviled, in thought, revolver, gunner who made it, cartridge filler, and everyone remotely connected with the matter, including myself for neglecting to change the charge. Then I had a better thought, and offered up thanks for being saved twice this night from disaster: from the crocodile first, and afterwards from all kinds of unknown horrors lurking around us in the darkness.

After all, I reflected, whether we are at home in bed or in the midst of an African forest, we are in God's hands, to save or to kill. How pitifully helpless is every human being that lies and sleeps unconscious, and how entirely at the mercy of a Providence which one has probably angered times unreckoned! Misfortune might as easily assail us at home in bed as here in the veldt, if it were so willed! Disaster, after all, can no more befall me here than there unless the Almighty decrees it.

This reflection was of much comfort to me subsequently, throughout many a weird and creepy night—in hours of real danger, compared with which the mostly imagined perils of that first night out were as the merest child's play.

Jack was made of sterner stuff than I, and even the unseen perils of the darkness and of the ambush scarcely affected his nerves.

His watch passed off, it may be assumed, without much trial of his courage, and when I awoke at high daylight one of the first things my eyes beheld was the carcass of our friend the hyena, which Jack had shot with his revolver. The report had not disturbed me, which may be taken as evidence that it must have been fairly "bedtime" when the end of my watch opened for me the door of slumberland.

We covered thirty good miles that day, and though we continually looked out for them, we saw nothing of "our friends the enemy." The night passed without adventure, and—though I cannot honestly say that I was absolutely free from those feelings of dread which had so unmanned me on the previous night—I am justified in declaring that I was not nearly so frightened at this second experience.

On the third day, towards evening, we came to a village, and here I was for turning aside into the veldt eastwards.

"Westwards," corrected Jack.

"No," I said, "eastwards, surely!"

"I bet you sixpence your map says westwards!" said Jack. "I was looking at it yesterday, and noticed it particularly!"

Now I could have taken the most solemn oath that I had read "eastwards" in the instructions at the foot of the map, and the route shown, as I remember, was to the right of the road, which would be eastwards.

Yet now, when I looked at our plan, the route was undoubtedly shown as lying to the left of the road—westwards—just as Jack said.

So to the left we went, and rode for an hour towards a hill whose outline we could just make out in the dim distance. Then the darkness came on, and we off-saddled for the night, full of spirits; for to-morrow, we thought, we should be on the very spot, and at work within a few yards of the treasure itself, and with a good start of our rivals into the bargain.

We were up and away with the first rays of light in the morning, and rode fast and joyously forward, merry as two schoolboys out for a jollification.

"It's a longish fifteen miles to that hill, I know," said Jack when we had ridden ten miles. "The map says fifteen miles; but we rode an hour last night and have ridden another to-day, and I'm hanged if we are any nearer than we were before."

This seemed true enough.

"It doesn't look what I should call 'conical,' either," I added. "I should call it a flat-topped thing if I were asked."

"So should I," said Jack; and we rode on.

"I wonder if there can be any mistake," I said, when we had ridden another ten miles and had stopped for a long rest.

"What kind of a mistake?" asked Jack.

"Why, about the map. That hill positively looks as far off as ever."

"It really does," Jack assented. "It must be a good fifty from the road."

"Perhaps the old boy wrote fifty and not fifteen, as we both seem to remember it," I said, fishing in my saddle-bag for the case which contained my map.

"I'm sure it's fifteen there," said Jack, "for I took the precaution of making a copy of both plan and instructions at Cape Town, in case those rascally friends of yours should get hold of our map and leave us to dig up all Africa for our treasure. I remember the wording quite well—it was 'westwards,' and fifteen miles to a conical hill, over a sandy plain."

These words of Jack's made me think—not those which referred to his taking of a copy of the map; I had done the same myself while on board the Chepstow Castle, and had my copy in my pocket at this moment. The words which struck me were those which referred to my "rascally friends," and suggested the possibility of the stealing of our map by them. The idea reminded me that my black bag with the map in it had been at their mercy in the cabin of the Chepstow Castlefor a week or more; though, it must be remembered, my money was apparently left untouched, as well as my revolver and the other things. Could they have tricked us by altering the map?

Flushed and excited at the very idea of such a thing, I communicated my idea to Jack.

"Good Heavens, man!" said he. "I never thought of it; yet it's the most likely thing in the world. Let's have a look at the map!"

CHAPTER XI
STALKING A MAN

We scanned that map over and over, but could find no trace of alterations. Jack suggested that it might be altogether new—a bogus copy, in fact; almost exactly like the real one, in case we should remember the original, but incorrect enough to lead us astray at the critical moment.

"What a pity my copy was done after these rascals had had their chance of doctoring it," said Jack; "otherwise we should soon see whether this one has been got at."

"But I have a copy done before we were left at Las Palmas!" I cried. "We can compare it with that, which must be right!"

"Peter, you are a trump!" said Jack, banging me on the back. "You're a glorious fellow! Produce it at once! Ha! ha! When in doubt, play Peter!"

I produced my copy, a rough thing, but accurately copied in the most essential portion, which was that which supplied instructions as to this very place. We compared my copy with the original, as we had supposed it to be, and found that it was as we suspected. We had been duped. The rascals had substituted for my original map a production of their own, made so like the former in the matter of handwriting and style, and even paper, that it would easily pass, if unsuspected, as the real article.

Furious with rage, we turned and retraced our way towards the road. We had come nearly thirty miles westward instead of turning, as we ought to have done, to the east, and had wasted a day and a half—it was intolerable! If we had met the Strongs at this time there would have been a battle; we were blood-hot, and should not have spared them. They had tricked us, and had, in all probability, unearthed the treasure by this time, and departed with it. I could not trust myself to speak as we rode swiftly back, in grim silence, upon our own tracks. Jack said nothing either.

That night, as we lay by our fire, it suddenly occurred to me to look at my revolver. It, after all, had been in my small black bag as well as the map. Probably they had tampered with it; for, otherwise, why should my weapon have missed fire and Jack's not? They had soused my cartridges—that much was pretty certain; but perhaps they had done the revolver some injury besides.

I examined it carefully. The lock worked all right; the drum revolved perfectly. I looked down the barrel; looked straight down it at the firelight, and saw nothing.

"Well?" said Jack.

I handed him the revolver. Jack looked down the barrel as I had; then he took a thin stick and poked at it.

"The demons!" he said; "they've choked it with lead or something. Curse them! it would have burst in your hand if you had fired it! We'll pay them out for this, Peter, if we have to chase them half round the world for it!"

Thirty miles back to the waggon road, twenty miles farther northwards, and then at last we were at the spot where, according to the original map, we should have turned off at the village called Ngami. Our bogus map gave no name to the village, which showed, as Jack said, the fiendish cunning of the Strongs; for if they had called it Ngami, we should have gone on until we had reached a village of that name, and from it we should have plainly seen, as we now saw, the conical hill on our right. As it was, we had gone sixty miles out of our way, and might have gone six hundred, or, indeed, never have struck the right road at all, but for my happy idea on board ship to take a copy of the map in case of accidents.

It was dusk when we arrived, riding with exceeding caution, within a mile or so of the conical hill. Here we dismounted by Jack's orders; for he, by the most natural process in the world—namely, the simple slipping into his proper place, as nature intends that people like Jack should do—had assumed the leadership of our party of two. It was quite right and proper that he should lead, for Jack had twice the resource and the readiness that I had been furnished withal; his wits were quicker workers than mine, and his judgment far more acute and correct. Jack decreed, then, that we should dismount and wait, and listen. If they had not yet found the treasure, he said, they would, of course, still be upon the ground; and if there, they would certainly light a fire when darkness fell.

"Then will come our chance!" added Jack.

"Of doing what?" I asked. "You don't think of shooting them asleep, Jack, surely!"

Jack laughed gently. "That's what they deserve, the blackguards!" he said. "Why do you suppose they spiked your revolver? I'll tell you. So that when they attacked you, as they fully intended to do, and would do now if we gave them the chance, you should be harmless and unable to hit them back."

It certainly did seem pretty mean, viewed in this light—a cold-blooded, premeditated, murderous kind of thing to do. The idea made me very angry. It gave me that almost intolerable longing one sometimes feels—which, at anyrate, I feel—to punch some offender's head; it is a feeling which generally assails one at helpless moments, as, for instance, when a schoolmaster (whose head cannot be punched with propriety) takes advantage of his position to bombard some wretched victim, who can utter no protest, with scathing remarks.

"What are we going to do, then?" I continued. "Of course we are not going to murder them in cold blood; but can't we punch their heads?"

Jack laughed. "Oh, it may come to that, likely enough," he said; "but what we must go for first is to disarm them. It is perfectly impossible to live near these men in any sort of comfort or security unless we first deprive them of their rifles and revolvers. That's what I want to do to-night. One or two of them will be asleep, the other watching. We must stalk them at about midnight, cover them with our revolvers, and make them 'hands up!'"

"No good covering them with my revolver," I said. "I'd better cover a pair with my rifle, and you the other fellow with your pistol. They know mine won't go off, well enough!"

"That's true," said Jack. "All right, your rifle then. We must shiver here till about midnight; you won't mind that for once."

And shiver we did for several hours, as much with excitement as with the cold of the night; for at about nine o'clock we saw the glow of a fire a mile or so away, which gave us the welcome assurance that our friends had not, at anyrate, found the treasure and departed.

I entreated Jack several times to let us be up and at them; but Jack was inexorable, and would not budge until our watches told us that midnight had come. Then Jack arose and stretched himself.

"Are you ready?" he said.

"Rather!" said I; "come on!"

"No hurry," continued my friend exasperatingly. "Change your cartridges first; so. Now take a drop of brandy neat, to correct the chill of the night—not too much. We may have to shoot a man; are you up to doing it?"

"If necessary," I said; "but I'd rather not."

"Of course not, nor would I; but if there is any hitch, or if either of the men show signs of being about to put in a quick shot, yours or mine must be in first; do you understand? Am I to command, or would you prefer to? It is better that one should take the lead."

"You, of course!" I said.

"Then do just as I tell you when we are among them. Now, are you ready? Then come along!"

Cautiously and softly we crept towards the place where the fire twinkled and glowed in the distance. As we came nearer, we could see that it had been built up close to a mimosa bush which lay between us and the circle of light shed by the burning brushwood. This was favourable to our purpose, for we were enabled to creep along without the danger of being seen, as we might have been even in the dark, had we been obliged to cross one of the wide open spaces which checked the plain.

No thieving jackal or designing lion could have stalked that party more patiently and noiselessly than we did; foot by foot, and yard by yard, we drew nearer to our prey, and at last we had reached the mimosa bush and were watching them as they lay, the rays of their fire all but shining upon us as we crouched, but falling just short. Jack placed his hand upon my arm, and whispered—

"James Strong watching, very sleepy," he breathed, scarcely audibly; "the others fast asleep. I take James, and you the other two. Are you ready? Follow me and stand at my side, but keep your rifle at your shoulder from now on, and never lower it for an instant. Are you ready?"

"Ready!" I managed to whisper, but my lips were so dry that hardly any sound came from them. Then Jack instantly rose and stepped out into the firelight—I following him.

CHAPTER XII
SCOTCHING A SNAKE

James Strong was lying half waking and half sleeping, his rifle at his side; he saw us instantly, however, as we stepped into the firelight, and was on his feet in a moment, dragging his rifle up with him.

"Drop the gun, James Strong," said Henderson, "and put up your hands. I am covering you, you see, and this is not the revolver you choked. Drop it at once, or I fire. I will count three. One—two"—Strong let the rifle fall. Neither the thud of this nor the sound of Jack's voice awoke the other two, who still slept, I covering them with my rifle.

"Pick that thing up, Peter," said Jack. "I'll see to the covering." I did as my captain bade me.

"Chuck it on the fire," he continued. "I shall pay you for it, Mr. Strong, but I am afraid you are scarcely to be trusted with a rifle just at present."

I heard Strong grind his teeth as I picked up his gun, took the cartridges out, and threw the weapon on the fire.

"Sit down, Mr. Strong, and empty your pockets," continued Jack, and his victim obeyed, because he could do nothing else.

"Take those other rifles, Peter, and do the same by them," pursued Jack; "then wake those fellows, and see if they sport revolvers. Have you none, Mr. Strong? Come, produce it if you have. Feel his pockets, Peter, and his saddle-bags. What, has he none? Well, you shall give him yours, Peter, one day; perhaps he will know how to get the lead out since he put it in!"

Strong's face through all this was not a pleasant study.

I obeyed Jack's decrees to the letter. I collected all the weapons—three rifles and one revolver—and threw them on the fire; I awoke the two sleepers, who swore frightful oaths when they realised the position of affairs, and cleared their pockets and wallets and saddle-bags of cartridges, all of which I confiscated.

"Good-night, gentlemen," said Jack, when my work was finished. "I shall repay you for all that has been taken from you to-night. Your zeal, you will understand, has been a little too great; you have given yourselves away. But for your premature attempt to rid yourselves of us on the island, and for one or two foolish matters since then, we might never have been aroused to our danger, and you would certainly have enjoyed many opportunities of shooting us at your leisure—in the back, of course. Now, you see, we have the whip hand of you."

"And you will use it, curse you," said James Strong, "to prevent us taking our legal share in the search for my uncle's property. I know you!"

"Nothing of the kind, my good man," said Jack cordially. "Dig away, by all means; you shall see that neither of us will interfere."

"Yes, and if we find the treasure, you will shoot us down; I know you, I say!" replied Strong. We made allowance for his temper, which was shocking to-day; but then his provocation had really been considerable.

"If you find the treasure you shall take it away with you in peace, so far as my friend and myself are concerned," said Jack. "We shall not shoot you, and you can't very well shoot us without rifles, can you? Good-night all; come, Peter."

We could see our good friends frenziedly poking among the embers for their burning weapons the moment we had departed; but, as Jack remarked, they were welcome to the barrels, and since he had taken care to keep up the conversation long enough to allow the woodwork to burn away, that would be all they would get.

Returning to our camp, we made up a fire for ourselves and tossed up for first sleep, for we must keep a stricter watch than ever now, or these desperate fellows would steal our weapons and turn the tables upon us. So we slept and watched by turns until morning, and it was on this night that I heard for the first time in my life the roar of a lion. It was not very near at hand, but, far away as it was, it sounded terrible enough to the inexperienced ear, and I thought over all I had read of the ways of lions in the works of Mr. Selous and other African sportsmen, and recalled an awkward propensity some of them have of coolly coming into camp and foraging among the waggons even in the glare of the firelight. If this brute were to come now and help itself to Jack Henderson before I could interfere, what a truly terrible thing it would be! The idea impressed me so deeply that I awoke Henderson and told him there was a lion roaring somewhere within hearing.

Jack was very sleepy, and my watch was only half over, which made him ridiculously angry to have been awaked.

"Well, what then?" he said. "Let him roar and be hanged! if he didn't wake me, why should you?"

"Why, he might come and bag you while you slept," I said; "travellers say they do that kind of thing."

"Well, what are you there for, man?" said Jack angrily, settling himself to sleep again. "You are there to shoot James Strong, or lions, or she-bears, or anything else that comes and plays the fool around here. For goodness' sake don't wake a fellow to talk about the habits of lions—shoot him if he comes, that's all you have to do!"

I suppose the lion had other engagements for that night, for his roars receded farther away and were lost, presently, in the distance.

We were up in the morning at the first glint of light, for we were naturally anxious to see the ground upon which our labours were to be lavished until the envious soil should reveal to us or the others the secret of old Clutterbuck. There it was, the open space of sandy hummocky soil, and there were the posts, three of them at least; we could not see the fourth. And there, too, was the upturned earth over a considerable area, representing the day's work, or the day and a half's work, of the Strongs, who had evidently toiled for all they were worth in order to make the most of the start they had gained upon us. The result of this haste on their part was to be seen in the shallowness of their digging, which appeared to have nowhere extended to a greater depth than six to nine inches. As we stood and surveyed the ground, our three friends came with their spades and set to work at once. They scowled at us ferociously, but made no reply to Jack's polite "Good-morning."

"I daresay they are rather annoyed with us," said Jack. "Now, Peter, don't be lazy, but begin to dig at once. I'm your bodyguard, remember, and shall do no work except thinking."

"Aren't you going to dig?" I said.

"Certainly not," said Jack; "I'm not one of the authorised. If I dug and found the treasure, there might be a legal point. Now dig up, man, and don't argue; you're wasting your time. Think of the nuggets and diamonds only awaiting the magic touch of your spade! George! if I had a legal position, wouldn't I dig!"

I did dig. I dug that morning until the sweat poured from my face and head like drops of rain. I dug till my arms and back ached so that I almost cried with the pain, while Jack sat or lay and watched, keeping an eye on the Strong party and entertaining me with light conversation. By the evening I was perfectly exhausted, and the greater part of the space of about two acres had been dug over, though not to any great depth, by one or other of the four workers, yet nothing had been discovered.

When Jack awoke me to take my watch at half-time that night, he said—

"Peter, I've been thinking."

"What about?" I asked sleepily.

"About that fourth post," he said.