So when Lady Waldon had slipped out into the darkness we lit half a dozen lamps and started a concert, Fred playing and we singing the sort of tunes that black men love.  He took the bait, hook, sinker, and all; in the silence at the end of the first song we heard his butt ground on the gravel just beyond the cactus hedge in front of us; and there he stayed, we entertaining him for an hour.  By that time we were quite sure that Lady Waldon had passed along the road behind him; so Fred went out and gave him tobacco.

“It’s time you went and looked at those Greeks again!” he advised him.  “You would be in trouble if they slipped away in the night!”

Now that a plan of campaign was finally decided on, there seemed much less to do than we had feared.  Mapping out in our minds the way round the back of the hill to the dhow was perfectly simple; we went and smoked on the hilltop, and within an hour after breakfast had every turn and twist memorized.  Fred drew a chart of the track for safety’s sake.

Persuading Brown of Lumbwa proved unexpectedly to be much the most difficult task.  Added to the fact that the askaris who marched behind and the Greeks who marched in front were unusually inquisitive, Brown himself was afraid.

“We’ll all be shot in the dark!” he objected.

“Would you rather,” Will asked, “be shot in the dark with a run for ’your money, or fed to the crocks in the doctor’s pond?” And be told him about the crocodiles to encourage him.

“They’ll have to let me out of jail at the end of the month,” Brown argued.

“Don’t you believe it!  In less than a week from now we’ll all be in on one and the same charge of filibustering!  They’ll not let you go back to British East to tell tales about their treatment of the rest of us,” Will assured him.

But Brown proved tinged with a little streak of yellow somewhere.  It was not until the afternoon march that Fred and Will, one on either side of him, by appeals to his racial instinct and recalling the methods of the military court, induced him to do his part.  Once having promised he vowed he would see the thing through to the end; but he was the weak link; he was afraid; and he disbelieved in the wisdom of the attempt.

It was Kazimoto in the end who kept Brown up to the mark, and shamed him into action by superior courage.  Fred found a chance to speak to him as the long string rested al noon under the narrow shade of a cactus hedge, and warned him in about fifty words of what was intended.  (The askaris, almost as leg-weary as the gang, were sprawling at the far end of the line, gambling at pitch-and-toss.)

“Be sure you sleep as near to the partition as you can.  Get details of the plan from Mr. Brown, and then drill the porters one by one!  Don’t let them tell one another.  You tell each one of them yourself!”

Then he walked down the line and ordered the porters in a loud voice to obey the askaris implicitly, and to work harder in return for the good food and care they were getting, winking at the same time very emphatically, with the eye the askaris could not see.