“You know well enough where I came from, Josiah Crabtree,” cried Dick wrathfully.  “You dropped me into the hollow for dead, didn’t you!”

“Why, I — er — that — is —­” stammered Crabtree; but could actually go no further.

“Don’t waste words on him, Dick,” put in Tom.  “Give him the thrashing he deserves.”

“Thrashing!” gasped Crabtree.

“Yes, thrashing,” replied Dick.  “If we were in America I would have you locked up.  But out here we must take the law into our own hands.  I am going to thrash you to the very best of my ability, and after that, if I meet you again I’ll —­I’ll -”

“Dun shoot him on sight,” suggested Aleck.

“You shall not touch me!” said the former teacher with a shiver.  “Chester — Rand — will you not aid me against this — er —­ savage young brute?”

“Don’t you call Dick a brute,” put in Sam.

“If there is any brute here it is you, and everyone in our party will back up what I say.”

“Mr. Crabtree, I have nothing to say in this matter,” said Dick Chester.  “It would seem that your attack on Rover was a most atrocious one, and out here you will have to take what punishment comes.”

“But you will help me, won’t you, Rand?” pleaded the former teacher, nervously.

“No, I shall stand by Chester,” answered Rand.

“And will you, too, see me humiliated?” asked Crabtree, turning to the other Yale students.  “I, the head of your expedition into equatorial Africa!”

“Mr. Crabtree, we may as well come to an understanding,” said one of the students, a heavyset young man named Sanders.  “We hired you to do certain work for us, and we paid you well for that work.  Since we left America you have found fault with nearly everything, and in a good many instances which I need not recall just now you have not done as you agreed.  You are not the learned scientist you represented yourself to be —­ instead, if we are to believe our newly made friends here, you are a pretender, a big sham, and a brute in the bargain.  This being so, we intend to dispense with your services from this day forth.  We will pay you what is coming to you, give you your share of our outfit, and then you can go your way and we will go ours.  We absolutely want nothing more to do with you.”

This long speech on Sanders’ part was delivered amid a deathlike silence.  As the student went on, Josiah Crabtree bit his lip until the blood came.  Once his baneful eyes fairly flashed fire at Sanders and then at Dick Rover, but then they fell to the ground.

“And so you — ahem —­ throw me off,” he said, drawing a long breath.  “Very well.  But I demand all that is coming to me.”

“You shall have every cent.”

“And a complete outfit, so that I can make my way back to the coast.”

“All that is coming to you —­ no more and no less,” said Sanders firmly.