Doubtless they were taking all three to some district remote from the province of Angola.  But who was carrying the still sick child?

“His mother; yes, his mother,” Dick Sand repeated to himself.  “She will have recovered strength for him; she will have done what these unhappy female slaves do, and she will fall like them.  Ah! may God put me again in front of her executioners, and I—­”

But he was a prisoner!  He counted one head in this live-stock that the overseers were driving to the interior of Africa.  He did not even know whether Negoro and Harris themselves were directing the convoy of which their victims made a part.  Dingo was no longer there to scent the Portuguese, to announce his approach.  Hercules alone might come to the assistance of the unfortunate Mrs. Weldon.  But was that miracle to be hoped for?

However, Dick Sand fell back again on that idea.  He said to himself that the strong black man was free.  Of his devotion there was no doubt.  All that a human being could do, Hercules would do in Mrs. Weldon’s interest.  Yes, either Hercules would try to find them and put himself in communication with them; or if that failed him, he would endeavor to concert with him, Dick Sand, and perhaps carry him off, deliver him by force.  During the night halts, mingling with these prisoners, black like them, could he not deceive the soldier’s vigilance, reach him, break his bonds, and lead him away into the forest?  And both of them, then free, what would they not do for Mrs. Weldon’s safety.  A water course would enable them to descend to the coast.  Dick Sand would again take up that plan so unfortunately prevented by the natives’ attack, with new chances of success and a greater knowledge of the difficulties.

The young novice thus alternated between fear and hope.  In fact, he resisted despair, thanks to his energetic nature, and held himself in readiness to profit by the least chance that might offer itself to him.

What he most desired to know was to what market the agents were taking the convoy of slaves.  Was it to one of the factories of Angola, and would it be an affair of a few halting-places only, or would this convoy travel for hundreds of miles still, across Central Africa?  The principal market of the contractors is that of N’yangwe, in Manyema, on that meridian which divides the African continent into two almost equal parts, there where extends the country of the great lakes, that Livingstone was then traversing.  But it was far from the camp on the Coanza to that village.  Months of travel would not suffice to reach it.

That was one of Dick Sand’s most serious thoughts; for, once at N’yangwe, in case even Mrs. Weldon, Hercules, the other blacks and he should succeed in escaping, how difficult it would be, not to say impossible, to return to the seacoast, in the midst of the dangers of such a long route.