Kenneth McAlpine Part 28

He is a joyful king now. He whacks the tom-tom, and summons two of his wives to squat beside him; not to help him to drink, but to _see_ him drink.

Then he summons Essequibo, and launches questions at him. "How long will he take to fatten? How long before he be ready to kill? Do the white men tremble to die?"

"No," Keebo tells him; "they rejoice to die because their spirits will go to a glorious land of flowers and suns.h.i.+ne."

The king gets blue with rage. He whacks Keebo with the tom-tom stick, and he whacks his wives; then he declares that the white men shall _not_ die, that their spirits shall _not_ go to the glorious land of flowers and suns.h.i.+ne.

Then he drinks "geen," and cools down.

But Keebo sees his advantage. He expatiates on the mechanical ability and cleverness of white men in general, and of Ma.s.sa Kennie, Archie, and Harvey in particular, and so inflames the king's cupidity, that he sends for the white men, and has their chains knocked off in his presence, and tells his sentries they are free, and any one who touches the hem of their garments shall be made food for the blue-bottle flies, and the long-legged "krachaw." [A kind of carrion-eating heron.]

"Ha! ha! ha!" he yells, "the king will live for ever."

Then he drinks again, yells again, whacks his wives with the tom-tom stick, and laughs to see them wince; and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, till he falls back asleep, and is borne away by the wives he whacked, and laid tenderly on the dais.

"Well," cried Harvey, "this is a queer ending to a day's march."

Zona shrugs his square thin shoulders, and Kenneth and Archie laugh.

"Ask those scoundrels," says Kenneth to Essequibo, "what they have done with our arms and our boat."

Very submissive are those spear-armed warriors now. They lead them to a wood, and there in the thicket they find everything intact.

"Now, lads, do as I tell you," said Kenneth.

And here is what our heroes did at Kenneth's advice. They rolled all their spare arms and ammunition in blankets, dug a hole, buried them, and turned the boat upside down on them. Next they tore up a lot of white and red rags, tied them to strings, and arranged these along, over, and around the boat, in precisely the way you would over a row of peas in the country to keep the sparrows away.

Funny though it may seem, this was quite enough to keep these savage negroes at bay. There was magic in it, they thought, and they gave that wood a wide berth.

Well, our heroes had, after a manner of speaking, to buy their lives.

The king had them before him at daybreak, not to order them to execution, but to give them his royal commands. They were to teach his people to do all the clever things that white men could do; if they failed, the king told them death would be the fate of their teachers.

"We do not fear to die, King 'Ntango," said Kenneth.

The king looked at him with a merry twinkle in his eye; then he took a sip of "geen" and said, through the interpreter Keebo,--

"You do not fear death? No, you think you go straight to your glorious land of suns.h.i.+ne; but listen, you will _not_. I will arrange it differently. I will cut from you a leg, an arm, and an ear,--ha! ha!

what think you? will the leg, and arm, and ear go first to the land of suns.h.i.+ne, and wait you? Take care, I am a great king, and I have twenty thousand ways to torture without killing."

Poor Kenneth confessed to himself that the king had the best of the argument, but he replied,--

"If you cut from me an arm or leg, how then shall I teach your people?"

The king smiled grimly, and said, "Go."

They must propitiate this king, that was evident, in order to gain his favour and their eventual liberty, for slaves they now undoubtedly were to all intents and purposes.

So they set themselves to teach his people to build boats, and sail on the great lake that occupied the centre of the plain; to make articles of furniture and household utility generally; to till the ground and to sow; and lastly, to cook the latter department belonged to Zona, and it greatly pleased the king. It pleased him also to see his men drilled, and to witness their deftness in rowing and sailing, but he saw not the sense of sowing.

"Has not the Great Spirit," he said to Kenneth, "given us the fruits that grow aloft on the trees, the fish in the water, and the beasts of the field? what need we of more?"

But days rolled into weeks, and weeks into months. The prospect of getting out of this king's country, either onward to the gold country, or back towards the coast, seemed to get less and less bright.

'Ntango's men became good soldiers, adept spearsmen; formerly they could send an arrow with terrible precision through a kind of blow-pipe into the breast of a leopard or lion; now they were not afraid to attack these creatures with the spear alone.

But these better soldiers of the king's were all the better able to watch their prisoners; there was no end to the king's cunning. Many and many a plan did Kenneth and his brothers in affliction fall upon to try to effect their escape, but every one was frustrated.

"No," said the king to Kenneth,--"I love you so much now I cannot part with you. You must live with me for ever and ever and ever."

This was, indeed, a dark prospect.

A whole year pa.s.sed away; _the_ one comfort of their lives now rested in the fact that they were permitted to enjoy each other's company. They had built quite a splendid bungalow for themselves, and surrounded it with a beautiful compound and gardens, in which the most delightful flowers bloomed, and where grew the most delicious fruit. Under other circ.u.mstances their lives would really have been enjoyable. Wild sports they had also in abundance, and fis.h.i.+ng and boating both by lake and on the river, but on these excursions one hundred of the king's trustiest spearmen always accompanied them, and their bungalow was surrounded by a palisade that _they_ did not build, and for ever guarded by sentries they could not elude.

One good for these poor people Kenneth did effect; he had a meeting-house built, and therein, Sabbath after Sabbath, he taught them to read and to pray, just as he had taught good Essequibo.

It was not long before the king found out Kenneth's powers as a musician, and at first it was hard on Kenneth, for he was kept playing from morning till night for weeks.

Music lost its power to some extent over the king at length, and latterly it was but rarely he sent for his musician to play. Nor had 'Ntango much of an ear for melody, for Kenneth manufactured a score of "chanters" out of pieces of cane, and taught a score of savages to make an unearthly kind of noise in all kinds of keys; and this pleased the king quite as much as the flute.

Archie thought of a plan at last to get a brief holiday. The first intimation of it was given the king by Essequibo. All the white men, he told him one morning, were ill and dying, and nothing would cure them but permission to explore the country to the nor'-west, the land where gold lay.

The king graciously gave his permission, and the expedition, well guarded, started to prospect for gold. After days and days of toil and travel they reached the El Dorado.

Disappointment and nothing else. Gold there was, but not for the gathering; it was deeply imbedded in veins of quartz, and the strongest machinery would be needed to work it.

Diamonds there were none.

Their gloom increased now. Their hopes of finding fortune had been but a youthful dream, and had ended in making them prisoners to a wild and despotic savage.

If there was any one ray now to illuminate their darkness and despair, it lay in the fact that their visit to the land of darkness had not been quite in vain; they had sowed the seeds of righteousness, and who could say what fruit these might not bear in after-times?

They tried now to make the best of their position, and take things as they came, determined, however, if a chance should arise, to seek safety in flight at all hazards. The river was not far away, and their boat and spare ammunition still lay intact and handy.

Nearly two years pa.s.sed away.

One night they had retired to their bungalow early. It was Archie's birthday, and they were going to have a big talk about home.

It was long past twelve o'clock before they thought of lying down. Ere they undressed they went for a walk as usual in their garden, to breathe the odour of the flowers, which the dews of evening never failed to draw out.

The moon was high in the heavens, looking like a little burnished s.h.i.+eld in the blue sky, and dimming the light of the thousand twinkling stars.

Suddenly from every direction there arose a muttering startled cry, which presently increased to a yell. Smoke, too, began to roll across the sky, increasing every moment, while tongues of flame leaped higher and higher.

They listened thunderstruck.

"Logobo--Logobo--Logobo!" That was the terrible cry.

"Heaven be praised!" cried Kenneth. "Now, boys, now, _men_, our time has come for freedom or for death. Follow me!"