“How long ago?” asked Monty.  But natives of that part of the earth are poor hands at reckoning time.

“Long time,” he assured us.  He might have meant six years, or sixty.  It would have been all the same to him.

“No.  Me not liking Tippoo Tib.  One time his slave.  That bad.  Byumby set free.  That good.  Now working here.  This very good.”

“Where do you think the ivory is?” (This from Yerkes.)

But the old man shook his head.

“As I understand it,” said Monty, “slaves came mostly from the Congo side of Lake Victoria Nyanza.  Slave and elephant country were approximately the same as regards general direction, and there were two routes from the Congo—­the southern by way of Ujiji on Tanganyika to Bagamoyo on what is now the German coast, and the other to the north of Victoria Nyanza ending at Mombasa.  Ask him, Fred, which way the ivory used to come.”

“Both ways,” announced Juma without waiting for Fred to interpret.  He had an uncanny trick of following conversation, his intelligence seeming to work by fits and starts.

“That gives us about half Africa for hunting-ground, and a job for life!” laughed Yerkes.

“Might have a worse!” Fred answered, resentful of cold water thrown on his discovery.

“Were you Tippoo Tib’s slave when he buried the ivory?” demanded Monty, and the old man nodded.

“Where were you at the time?”

Juma made a gesture intended to suggest immeasurable distances toward the West, and the name of the place he mentioned was one we had never heard of.

“Can you take us to Tippoo Tib when we leave this place?” I asked, and be nodded again.

“How much ivory do you suppose there was?” asked Yerkes.

“Teli, teli!” he answered, shaking his head.

“Too much!” Fred translated.

“Pretty fair to middling vague,” said Yerkes, “but”—­judicially—­“almost worth investigating!”

“Investigating?” Fred sprang from his chair.  “It’s better than all King Solomon’s mines, El Dorado, Golconda, and Sindbad the Sailor’s treasure lands—­rolled in one!  It’s an obviously good thing!  All we need is a bit of luck and the ivory’s ours!”

“I’ll sell you my share now for a thousand dollars—­come—­come across!” grinned Yerkes.

There was a rough-house after that.  He and Fred nearly pulled the old attendant in two, each claiming the right to torture him first and learn the secret.  They ended up without a whole rag between them, and had to send Juma to head-quarters for new blue dressing-gowns.  The doctor came himself—­a fat good-natured party with an eye-glass and a cocktail appetite, acting locum-tenens for the real official who was home on leave.  He brought the ingredients for cocktails with him.

“Yes,” he said, shaking the mixer with a sort of deft solicitude.  “There’s more than something in the tale.  I’ve had a try myself to get details.  Tippoo Tib believes in up-to-date physic, and when the old rascal’s sick he sends for me.  I offered to mix him an elixir of life that would make him out-live Methuselah if he’d give me as much as a hint of the general direction of his cache.”