“Some of it, d’you say?” said I.

“Some of it, yes.  A million tusks.  Some say two million!  Some say three!  Thunder!—­you take a hundred good tusks and bury them; you’ll see the hill you’ve made from five miles off!  A hundred thousand tusks would make a mountain!  If any one buried a million tusks in one spot they’d mark the place on maps as a watershed!  They must be buried here, there, everywhere along the trail of Tippoo Tib—­perhaps a thousand in one place at the most.  Which of you two gentlemen is the lord?”

“Did Hassan lead you to any of it?” Fred inquired.

“Not he!  The jelly-belly!  The Arab pig!  He led me to Ujiji—­that’s on Lake Tanganika—­the old slave market where he himself was once sold for ten cents.  I don’t doubt a piece of betel nut and a pair of worn-out shoes had to be thrown in with him at the price!  There he tried to make me pay the expenses in advance of a trip to Usumbora at the head of the lake.  God knows what it would have cost, the way he wanted me to do it!  Are you the lord, sir?”

“What did you do?” asked Fred.

“Do?  I parted company!  I had made him drunk once. (The Arabs aren’t supposed to drink, so when they do they get talkative and lively!) And I knew Arabic before ever I crossed the Atlantic—­learned it in Egypt—­ran away from a sponge-fishing boat when I was a boy.  No, they don’t fish sponges off the Nile Delta, but you can smuggle in a sponge boat better than in most ships.  Anyhow, I learned Arabic.  So I understood what that pig Hassan said when he talked in the dark with his brother swine.  He knew no more than I where the ivory was!  He suspected most of it was in a country called Ruanda that runs pretty much parallel with the Congo border to the west of Victoria Nyanza in German East Africa, and he was counting on finding natives who could tell him this and that that might put him on the trail of it!  I could beat that game!  I could cross-examine fool natives twice as well as any fat rascal of an ex-slave!  Seeing he had paid all expenses so far, however, I was not much to the bad, so I picked a quarrel with him and we parted company.  Wouldn’t you have done the same, my lord?”

But Fred did not walk into the trap.  “What did you do next?” he asked.

“Next?  I got a job with the agent of an Italian firm to go north and buy skins.  He made me a good advance of trade goods—­melikani,* beads, iron and brass wire, kangas,** and all that sort of thing, and I did well.  Made money on that trip.  Traveled north until I reached Ruanda—­went on until I could see the Fire Mountains in the distance, and the country all smothered in lava.  Reached a cannibal country, where the devils had eaten all the surrounding tribes until they had to take to vegetarianism at last.”

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* Melikani, the unbleached calico made in America that is the most
useful trade goods from sea to sea of Central Africa.
** Kanga, cotton piece goods.
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“But did you find the ivory?” Fred insisted.