“Speak ye, and so do”

Ok Thou, who gavest English speech
        To both our Anglo-Saxon breeds,
And didst adown all ages teach
        That Art of crowning words with deeds,
May we, who use the speech, be blest
        With bravery, that when shall come
In thy full time our hour of test —
        That promised hour of Christendom,
We may be found, whate’er our need,
        How grim soe’er our circumstance,
Unwilling to be fed or freed,
        Or fame or fortune to enhance
By flinching from the good begun,
        By broken word or serpent plan,
Or cruelty in malice done
        To helpless beast or subject man. 
                                Amen

There was method, of course, behind the difference in treatment extended to us and to the Greeks.  The motive for making Coutlass sell his mules and stay within the miserable confines of the rest-camp was to make sure be had money enough to feed himself, and to cut off all opportunity for swift escape.  Not for a second were the Germans sufficiently unwary to admit collusion with him.

The real ownership of the three mules was left in little doubt when they were sold at public auction and bought in by Schillingschen.  Fred and Will attended the auction the day following our scene in court, and extracted a lot of amusement from bidding against Schillinschen, compelling him finally to pay a good sum more than the mules were worth.

Coutlass was in a strange predicament.  The looting of Brown’s cattle had been a bid for fortune on his own account.  Yet by causing us to give chase he had brought us into the German net more handily than ever they had hoped.  So it was reasonable on his part to suppose that if he could betray us more completely still, he might get rewarded instead of treated as a broken tool.

Yet he did not dare to approach our camp, for fear lest Fred should carry out his threat and fight.  The fight would certainly be reported by the askari on watch at the crossroads, and that would destroy his chance of making believe to be in our confidence.  So he kept sending notes to me when the others were absent, even the native boy who brought them—­not daring to enter our camp, but fastening the message to a stone and throwing it in through the tent door.

They were strange, illiterate messages, childishly conceived, varying between straight-out offers to help us escape and dark insinuations that he knew of something it would pay us well to investigate.

It was an English missionary spending three days in Muanza on his way to Lake Tanganika, who came to see what he could do for my wound and cleared up the mystery quite a little by reporting what he had heard in the non-commissioned mess, where he had been invited to eat a meal.

“The Greek,” he said, “is trying to curry favor by pretending he knows your plans.  If he succeeds in worming into your confidence and persuading you to make plans to escape with him, they will feel justified in putting you in jail—­and that, I understand, is where they want you.”