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The man knew what was required and obeyed, advancing, calling, and listening by turns, till, at last, catching the true direction of the sound he went rapidly, Berselius and Adams following close behind.
Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him. The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had died to all the things he had ever known.
Berselius was also sleeping soundly when, at about one o'clock in the morning, Félix aroused him. One of the porters had been caught stealing some of the meat left over from the distribution of the night before. The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.
As Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, turned, it was already night. The camp fire which the porters had lit was crackling, and Berselius, helped by his friend, sat down with his back to the tree and his face toward the fire. "Are you better?" asked Adams, as he took a seat beside him and proceeded to light a pipe. "My head," said Berselius.
"The man has obsessed you already, and you'll come back, if you go, like Bauchardy, the man who died in the hospital at Marseilles, cursing Berselius, yet so magnetized by the power of the chap that you would be ready to follow him again if he said 'Come, and you had the legs to stand on. That is how Bauchardy was." "The man, undoubtedly, has a great individuality," said Adams.
Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became a member. He was not invited to the bloody banquet he invited himself. He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed; later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold's idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.
Again, with theatrical effect, as the pools had burst upon them on leaving the forest, the camping place unveiled itself. "Now," said Adams in triumph, "do you remember that?" Berselius did not reply. He was walking along with his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not stop, or hesitate, or make any exclamation to indicate whether he remembered or not. "Do you remember?" cried Adams.
Just a handshake, yet it told Adams in some majestic way, that the man on the bed knew that all was up with him, and that this was good-bye. Berselius then spoke for a while to Maxine on indifferent things. He did not mention his wife's name, and he spoke in a cold and abstracted voice.
It will be remembered that it was a two days' march from Fort M'Bassa through the isthmus of woods to the elephant country. At the edge of the forest the trees were very thinly set, but for the rest, and a day's march from the fort, it was jungle. Would Berselius be able to penetrate that jungle? Time would tell. Berselius knew nothing about it; he only knew what lay before his sight.
There was a slight rise in the ground before them just here, and as they took it the stench became almost insupportable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought him forward to his side.
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