Harold Bindloss - Long Odds

He made a little suggestive gesture which seemed to indicate that the road was unsafe, turning towards his subordinate as though for confirmation, but once more Ormsgill fancied there was a warning in his glance.

"Of a surety!" said the Lieutenant Luiz. "Lamartine is probably not alive by now. Still, if the Señor Nares insists on going it is well that he should take the higher road."

In the meantime the canoe boys had unrolled a canvas hammock and lashed it to its pole. Nares stood up as they approached the veranda stairway with the pole upon their wooly crowns.

"I will come back and look at your sick," he said. "We have only the one hammock, Ormsgill."

Ormsgill smiled. "There is nothing very wrong with my feet, and I haven't had a dose of fever for some time. It isn't your fault that you have one now."

He made the two officers a little inclination as he took off his hat, and Nares, who shook hands with them, crawled into his hammock. He, at least, had the fever every two or three months or so. Then the boys struck up a marching song as they swung away with their burden into the steamy shadow, and the Commandant leaned on the balustrade listening with a little dry smile until the crackle of trampled undergrowth and sighing refrain died away.

"When one desires to encourage such men it is generally wise to point out the difficulties," he said. "One would fancy that they were fond of them, especially the Señor Ormsgill, who is of the kind the customs of this world make rebels of."

"And the other?" asked Lieutenant Luiz, who had, not without reason, a respect for the wisdom of his superior. He had found that it was, in some ways at least, warranted.

The Commandant lighted his cigarette, and watched the first smoke wreath float straight up into the stagnant air. "He would be a martyr. It is a desire that is incomprehensible to you and me, but there are others besides him who seem to cherish it – and in this land of the devil opportunities of satisfying it are generally offered them."

He looked at Lieutenant Luiz, and once more the latter's face relaxed into the nearest approach to a grin his sense of dignity allowed. One could have fancied there was an understanding of some kind between the men.

In the meanwhile Nares' bearers were plodding down a two-foot trail walled in by thorny underbrush and festoons of as thorny creepers that flowed down in tangled luxuriance between the towering cottonwood trunks. There was dim shade all about them, and the atmosphere was like that of a Turkish bath, steamy and almost insufferably hot, only that there was in it something which checked instead of accelerated the cooling perspiration. Now and then the bearers gasped, and Ormsgill's face was flushed as he walked beside the hammock.

"We should get through by to-morrow night if we take the lower road," he said. "I believe that would be advisable, though I'm not quite sure of it. At least, it's the nearer one, and Lamartine was going down hill very fast when I left him. In fact, he sent two of the boys to the Mission for Father Tiebout. In one way, the thing's a trifle invidious, but, you see, Lamartine is of his persuasion."

Nares smiled. "I'm to have the care of his body, and Father Tiebout of his soul. Well, we have fought as allies on those terms before, and I guess I don't mind."

"You're quite sure? After all, in one way, the soul of Lamartine would be something of a trophy."

The American looked up at him with a faint kindling in his eyes. "Tiebout has so many to his credit – and he could afford to spare me this one. Still, at least, I can heal the body, if I am called in in time."

"Which is a good deal. Especially in a land where it is singularly difficult to believe that men have souls at all."

Nares shook his head. "If I didn't feel quite so played out I'd take your challenge up," he said. "Guess we'll join issue on that point another time. You mentioned once or twice that Lamartine was very sick?"

"There's about one chance in twenty we get there before he's dead. It's one of the reasons I'm taking the lower road. It's the nearest."

It was characteristic that Ormsgill did not state that it was also one of the reasons he had traveled for four days and most of four nights under an enervating heat. Lamartine was an alien of dubious character, and in some respects distinctly uncongenial habits, but Ormsgill had not spared himself to give his comrade that one chance for his life.

"Didn't Lieutenant Luiz' recommendation count?" asked Nares.

"No," said Ormsgill, reflectively. "I don't think it did. At least, not as he meant it to, though I've been trying to worry out what he did mean exactly. One thing's certain. He wasn't prompted by any solicitude for our safety. You see, he might have been counting on my distrust of him, or my usual obstinacy, and wanted me to take the higher road after all. Or he may have been playing another game. I don't know. That's why we'll take the nearest way and not worry. When you're in doubt, it's generally wisest to do the obvious thing."

Nares made a little drowsy gesture of concurrence. "Straight to the mark – and you get there now and then. At least, it can't be the wrong path – and if one doesn't finish the journey it's only a falling out by the way. A good many of us have done that in this country."

Ormsgill said nothing. He had somewhere buried deep in him a vague, unformulated faith which, however, seldom found expression of any kind in words, and was tinged with a bitterness against all conventional creeds, which was not altogether astonishing in the case of a man who had lived as he had done in the dark land. Still, he had traveled four days and nights to bring his sick comrade the assistance he felt would arrive too late and now, when he dragged himself along dead weary through the steamy shade, he had reasons for surmising that there was peril somewhere down the winding trail.

Nares was asleep when they passed the forking and held on by the lower road, and Ormsgill did not tell the boys that he had seen a huddled black figure lying a few yards back among the undergrowth. He did not even stop to look at it. Labor is in demand in that country, and when it is supplied by a dusky contractor who collects the raw material in the bush the unfortunate who sickens on the long march from the interior usually dies. Transport on the human head makes provisions costly in a devastated country, and it is not economy to feed a man who will bring one nothing in. A white man, as everybody knows, may not own or sell a slave in any part of Africa under European control, but he must have labor, and there are in practice ways of getting over the obvious difficulty. They are not ways which are discussed openly, and, so far as one can ascertain, are by no means satisfactory to the negro for whose benefit they are sometimes said to be devised. In this, and a few other matters, the negro's opinion is not, however, deferred to. It is his particular business to gather rubber for the white man and grow his cocoa, and the fact that he is not as a rule content to recognize this obligation is very seldom taken into consideration.

It had been dark two hours, and the bearers could go no further without a rest, when Ormsgill camped on a ridge beneath tall tufted palms at least a hundred yards from the trail. There was a reason for this, and also for the fact that he allowed no fires to be made, though of all things the negro loves a cheerful blaze. The powers of evil are very real to him, which is by no means astonishing considering the land he lives in. The boys sat huddled about the empty hammock among the palms, while the two white men lay upon a waterproof ground sheet some fifty yards apart from them and nearer the trail. Ormsgill had had very little sleep during the last four nights, but he was very wide awake then, and a good magazine rifle, which had been smuggled through San Roque without the Commandant's notice, lay across his knees.