LONG- ODDS.

Bruce Herald, Volume XVII, Issue 1753, 28 May 1886, Page 5

LONG- ODDS.

The story whioh is narrated in the following pages came to me from the lips of my old friend Allan Q.uatermain, or Huuter Quaterlnain, as we used to call him in fcjouih Africa, lie told it to me one eveniug when 1 was staying with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after that, the death of his only son so unsettlod him that he immediately left England, accompanied by two companions, who were old fellow-voyagors of his, Sir Henry Curtis ahd Capt. Good, and | has now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa, lie is persuaded that a white people, of which he has heard rumours aii his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them before he dies, ibis ia the wild quest upon which he and his companiona have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they will never return. One letter only havo 1 received from the old gentleman, dated from a mission station higU up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about 300 miles north of Zanzibar j in it he saya they have gone through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far toward making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be a *' magnificent and unexampled discovery." I greatly fear, however, that all he haa discovered is death ; for this letter came a lung time ago, and nobody has heard a single wora of the party since. Ihey have totally vanished. It was on the last evening of my Btay at his house that he told the ensuing story to me and Capt. Good, who was uming with him. He had eaten his dinnei and drunk two or three glasses of oid port, just to help Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusual thing for him to do for he was a most abstemious man, having conceived, as he used to Bay, a great horror of diiuk from having observed its effects upon the class ot men— hunters, transport riders and others— among wnom he had passed so many years ol his file. Consequently, the good wine took more elfect on him than it would have done on mo^t mon, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more lreely than usual. Lear old man ! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the vestibule, with his gray hair sticking up iv scrubbingbrush fashion, his Bhrive_ed yellow face and his large dark eyes, that were as keen as any hawk's, and yet aa aoft aa a buck's. The whole room was hung with trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story about every one of them, if only you could get him to tell them. Ueneraily he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures, but to-nigut the port wine had made him more communicative. "Ah, you brute 1" he said, Btoppmg beneath an unusually large skull of a lion, which was fixed j ust above the mantelpiece, bentath a long row of guns, ita jaws distended to their utmost width. " Ah, you brute I Y r ou have given me a lot of trouble for tho last dozen years, and will, 1 suppose, to my dying day." " Xeli ua the yarn, Quattrmuiu," eaid Good. '• You have olten promised to tell me, and you never have." " You had better nofc ask me fco," ho answered, " for it is a longish one." " All right," 1 said " the evening ia ycung, I and there is some more port." i Thus adjured, he filled hiß pipe from a jar i of coaiee-cuc Boer tODacco that was always ; standing on the mantelpiece, and, still walk- . ing up and down the room, began i

*■ " Ifc was, I think, in the March of 186£ t that, I was up in Sikukuni's country. It wai - just after old "-"equati's time, and Sikukun: 1 hud got into pow"e'r— I forget bow. Anyway I was ihere. I had heard that the Baped: ) people had got down an enormous quantity 3 of ivory from the interior, and so I started t, with a waggon load of goods and came straight , away from Middelburg to try and trade some , of it. It was a risky thing to go into the , country so early, but I knew that there were . one or two others after that lot of ivory, so 1 - determined to have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had got so tough from , coutiuuol knocking about that I did not set it down at much. Well I got on all right for a while. It was a wondorlully beautiful piece ' of bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains ruuning through it, and round granite kop- ' pies starting up here and there, looking out like senliuels over the rolling waste of bush. ', But it was very hot — hot as a stew pan — and when I was thero tint March, which, of 1 course, is autumn in that part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning, as I trekked along down by the Oliphant river, I used to creep out of the waggon afc dawn and look out. But there was no river to be scon— only a long line of billows of what looked like the finest elton wool to^ed up lightly with a pitchfo-k. It was the fever mist. Out from amoDg the scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, aa though there were hundreds of tiny fires alight in it — reek rising from thousands of tons of rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was tbe beauty of death ; and all those lines and blots ot vapour wrote one great word across tho surface of the country, and thafc word was ' fever.' "It was a dreadful year of illness, thafc. I came, I remember, to one little kraal of Knobnosos, and went up to see if I could get some maas (curdle buttermilk) and a few mealies. As I got near I waa struck with the, silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place, though [it had been evidently recently inhabited, waß as still as tbe bush round ifc und somo guinea fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes right at she kraal gate. 1 rcin-'inber that 1 hesitated a little before going in, there was such au air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks desolate when man hat nob yet laid bis hand upon her breast j._ she is only lonely. But when man has been and passed away, then she looks desolate. " Well, I passed into the kraal, and went up to the principal hut. In front of the hut was something with an old sheepskin kaross (rug) thrown over it. I stooped down and threw off the rug, and then shrank back amazed, for under it was the body of a young woman recently dead- For a moment I thought of turning back, but my curiosity overcame me j so going past the woman, I went down on my bauds and knees, aud crept into the hut. It was so dark that I could not sec anything, though I could smell a great deal — so I lit a match. It was a ' tandscickor' ruateh, and burnt slowlj* and diruly, and as the light gradually increased I made out what I thought was a lot of peoplo, men women, and children,; fast asleep. Presently it burned up brightly, and I saw that they too, five of them 'altogether, were quite dead. One was a baby, I dropped tbe match in a hurry, and was making my way out of the hut as hard aa 1 could go, wben I caught sight of two bright eyes staring out of a corner. Thinking it was a wild cat or some sjch animal, 1 redoubled my haste, when suddenly a voice near the eyes began first to mutter, and then fco send up a succession ot awful yells. Hastily I lit another match, and perceived that tne eyes belonged to an old woman, wrapped np in a greasy leather garment. Tukiug her by the arm, 1 dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come by herself, and the Btench was overpowering me. Suub a sight as Bhe was — a nag of bones, covered over with black shrivelled parchment. The only white thing about her waa her wool, and sho seemed to be pretty well dead but lor her eyes and her voice. She thought I waa a devil come to take her, and that is why she jelled so. Well, 1 got tier down to fcho wuggou, and "uve her a ' tot' oi Cape smoke, and then, as boon us it was ready, poured a Oout a piut ot beel'-tea down her throat, mado from tbe flesh of a vilderbeeate I Had killed the day before, and after that she brightened up wonderfully. she could ta.k Zulu— iudeed it turned out tuab she had runaway from Zululund in T'Chaka's biuie— and she told me that all the people I had seen had died of fever. When tiiey hai died tbe other inhabitants ot the kraal had taken the cattle und gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless from age and inui-mity, to perish of starvation or disease, us the case might be. ishe had been sitting there for three days among the dead bodies when 1 found her. 1 took her on to the next kraai, aud gave bhe headman a blanket to take care of her, promising him another if I found her well wnen 1 cauia back. I remember that he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets lor the sake of such a worthless old creature. ' Why did I not leave her in the bush r* he usked. Those people carry the doctrine of tne survival of tho fittest to its extreme, you see. «• It was the night ufter I had got rid of the old woman that I made my firat acquaintance with my friend youder," aud he nodded toward the skull that a seined to be griumug down at us in the shadow of the wide mantelshelf. "1 had trekked from dawn till 11 o'clook — a long — but i wanted to get on ; and then had fche oxen turned out to graze, aending the voorlooper to look after them, meaning to iuspau again about 6 o'clock, aud trek with the moon till ten. l'hen I got into the waggon and had a good sleep till 2 : 30 or so in the afternoon, when 1 got up and cooked some meat, and had my dinner, washiug it down with a pannikin of black coffee -for it was difficult to get preserved milk in those days. Just as I had finished, and the driver, a man called Tom, was washing up the thiugs, iv comes fche young scoundrel of a voorlooper driving one ox before him. " ' Where are the oxen ?' I asked. " • Eoob !" he Baid, ' Eoos ! (chief) the ether oxen have gone away. I turned my back for a minute, and when 1 looked round again tiiey weie all gone except Kaptein nere, who was rubbing his back against a tree!" " You mean thab you have Veen asleep, and let them stray, you vihaiu. 1 will rub your back against a stick,' 1 unewered, feeling very angry, ior it was not a pleasant prospect to be stuck up m that fever trap, lor a week or ao while we were hunting for the oxen. " Off you go, and you too, Tom, and mind you dou't come back till you have found them. They have trekked back along the Middelburg road, and are a dozen miles off by now, I'll bo bound. Now, no words, go, both of you." " Tom, the driver, swore, and caught the lad a hearty kick, which he richly deserved, and then, having tied old __apiem up to ihe disselboom with a reim, mey got their assegais and sticks and started. I would have gone too, only I knew that somebodymust look after the waggon, and I did not like to leave either of tne boys with it at J night (2b fie continued)