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If you don't hasten, the flying canoe will yet escape you! More power to your arms, O ye paddlers! Bend to your strokes! The canoe that you pursue is light and it is carried in the heart of the wind! You have no time to lose, white men and red, if you would reach the precious prize! The faster you go the better you will like it! And the better we will, too! On! swift canoes, on!"
The mist was still thick on the water, but a good watch was being kept, for as Iamb' Itam approached the camp the figures of two men emerged out of the white vapour, and voices spoke to him boisterously. He answered, and presently a canoe lay alongside, and he exchanged news with the paddlers. All was well. The trouble was over.
Oh, you clumsy devil! . . . No, Kaspar," went on Lingard, after the bow-man had got hold of the end of the brace he had thrown down into the canoe "No, Kaspar. The sun is too much for me. And it would be better to keep my affairs quiet, too. Send the canoe four good paddlers, mind, and your canvas chair for me to sit in. Send it about sunset. D'ye hear?"
The other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dug-out with four paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with the ivory.
"Where have you tumbled from?" "Hughtown, St. Mary's, was the last bit of mother earth I touched before I sprang aboard the Queen of Paddlers. May we venture within your private domain?" "Why, certainly, John," and he lifted the rail and beckoned us forward. "Two chums of mine," said John, naming us, and then he named the captain as his respected cousin forty-two times removed.
A man on a less venturesome quest than mine could hardly have set out with the brigades of canoemen for the north country and not have been thrilled like a lad on first escape from school's leading strings. There we were, twenty craft strong, with clerks, traders, one steersman and eight willowy, copper-skin paddlers in each long birch canoe.
The canoes swung out and the paddlers settled into the steady stroke to which they were growing accustomed. Hour after hour they forged on, the Brazilians adjusting their speed to that of the Americans, who had not yet attained the muscular ease of habitual canoemen.
Goodenough promised that they should not be obliged to proceed unless a safe conduct for their return was obtained from the King of the Fans. A large canoe was procured, sufficient to convey the whole party. Twelve paddlers were hired, and the goods taken down and arranged in the boat.
A half-dozen Iroquois canoes were moving slowly up the stream. They were in single file, and the first canoe was the largest. But the aspect of the little fleet was wholly different from that of an ordinary group of Iroquois war canoes. It was dark, somber, and funereal, and in every canoe, between the feet of the paddlers, lay a figure, stiff and impassive, the body of a chief slain in battle.
Our paddlers indeed fraternised with the enemy, against whom they would have been fighting if they had not been employed by us. The usual tornado burst in the night and we did not make a start until 7 a.m. when we continued up the river and passed several villages before 2 p.m. when Djabir came in sight. The view of the town from the distance is very pretty indeed.
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