“If he thinks we’re dead—?”

“And if he believes in that map—­”

“He’ll not need the map.  He’ll have memorized it.  There’s only a circle drawn on it to mark the Elgon district.  All the old pencil marks have been rubbed out as he searched the other likely places and drew them all blank.”

“He’ll travel without military escort?”

“Sure!  He won’t want witnesses!  He’ll make believe it’s a scientific trip.  Remember, he’s a professor of ethnology.  That’s how he puts it all over the British and goes where he pleases without as much as by-your-leave.”

“Say, fellows!  It’s a moral cinch that when we broke away from Muanza he made up his mind in a flash to return to British East and destroy us on the way.  He thinks he made a clean job of that.  I’ll bet he loaded the launch down with stuff for a long safari, and thinks now he has a clear run and can take his time!”

“If that’s how the cards lie, the game’s ours!”

Coutlass saw the point at last and offered himself on the altar of forgiveness and friendship.

“Make me your partner, gentlemen, and if he travels within a hundred miles of this I will crawl into that Schillingschen’s tent in the night and slit his throat!  I would murder him as willingly as I eat when I am hungry!”

“Your job has been assigned you!” answered Fred.  “When Mr. Brown’s cattle are back in Lumbwa perhaps we’ll give you something else to do!”

Nevertheless, Coutlass had outlined in a flash the limits of the plan.  We would draw the line at murdering even Schillingschen, but must help ourselves to his outfit as our only chance of re-outfitting without betraying our presence in British East.  But the plan was not without rat-holes in it that a fool could see.

“Schillingschen’s boys will escape and run to the nearest British official with the story!”

“And the British official will be so full of the importance of Schillingschen and the need of protecting his beastly carcass—­to say nothing of the everlasting disgrace of letting him be scoughed on British territory—­and the official reprimand from home that’s sure to follow—­that he’ll come hot-foot to investigate!”

“We’ll have to provide against that,” said Fred, and we all laughed, including Coutlass.  Talk of provisions is easy when you have no means out of which to provide.  It did not occur to include Coutlass in the calculations, or to dismiss him from them; but without exchanging any remarks on the subject it was clear enough to all of us that no such plan could hope to succeed with the Greek at large, at liberty to spoil it.  We saw we should have to keep him in our party for the present.

“Don’t forget,” said Coutlass, more accustomed than we to seizing the strategic points of desperate situations, “that Schillingschen will have his own boys with him from German East.”

“I didn’t see any with him on the launch,” I objected.