CHAPTER XX.

CONCLUSION.

Two days after, the 20th of July, Mrs. Weldon and her companions met a caravan going toward Emboma, at the mouth of the Congo.  These were not slave merchants, but honest Portuguese traders, who dealt in ivory.  They made the fugitives welcome, and the latter part of the journey was accomplished under more agreeable conditions.

The meeting with this caravan was really a blessing from Heaven.  Dick Sand would never have been able to descend the Zaire on a raft.  From the Falls of Ntamo, as far as Yellala, the stream was a succession of rapids and cataracts.  Stanley counted seventy-two, and no boat could undertake to pass them.  It was at the mouth of the Congo that the intrepid traveler, four years later, fought the last of the thirty-two combats which he waged with the natives.  Lower down, in the cataracts of Mbelo, he escaped death by a miracle.

On the 11th of August, Mrs. Weldon, Dick Sand, Jack, Hercules, and Cousin Benedict arrived at Emboma.  Messrs. Motta Viega and Harrison received them with generous hospitality.  A steamer was about sailing for the Isthmus of Panama.  Mrs. Weldon and her companions took passage in it, and happily reached the American coast.

A despatch sent to San Francisco informed Mr. Weldon of the unlooked-for return of his wife and his child.  He had vainly searched for tidings of them at every place where he thought the “Pilgrim” might have been wrecked.

Finally, on the 25th of August, the survivors of the shipwreck reached the capital of California.  Ah! if old Tom and his companions had only been with them!

What shall we say of Dick Sand and of Hercules?  One became the son, the other the friend, of the family.  James Weldon knew how much he owed to the young novice, how much to the brave black.  He was happy; and it was fortunate for him that Negoro had not reached him, for he would have paid the ransom of his wife and child with his whole fortune.  He would have started for the African coast, and, once there, who can tell to what dangers, to what treachery, he would have been exposed?

A single word about Cousin Benedict.  The very day of his arrival the worthy savant, after having shaken hands with Mr. Weldon, shut himself up in his study and set to work, as if finishing a sentence interrupted the day before.  He meditated an enormous work on the “Hexapodes Benedictus,” one of the desiderata of entomological science.

There, in his study, lined with insects, Cousin Benedict’s first action was to find a microscope and a pair of glasses.  Great heaven!  What a cry of despair he uttered the first time he used them to study the single specimen furnished by the African entomology!