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Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power, struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog. B'selius was alive and able to clench his fist.
Félix was with him, and Adams, who was heading the column, could hear the shouts of the Zappo Zap. The men with their loads went at a quick walk, sometimes breaking into a trot, urged forward by the gun-butt of Félix. The heat was sweltering, but there was no rest.
Berselius had been slowly stripped by the wilderness of everything now but the clothes he stood up in, his companion and two porters. Guns, equipment, tents, stores, the Zappo Zap, and the army of men under that ferocious lieutenant, had all "gone dam."
"What did you bring this thing for?" asked Berselius, pointing to Adams's elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering. "To shoot with," said Adams, laughing. Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh. "Well, bring it," said he; "but I don't envy your gun-bearers." But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion.
It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Félix, were all that remained of Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there
Then he started to search hither and thither for the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre of ground.
The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the "soldiers" of the state by special leave from headquarters. Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing.
A shout from Félix, and the Zappo Zap came running up the line; his head was flung up and he was sniffing the air. Then, walking beside Adams, he stared ahead right away over the country before them to the far skyline.
All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as "soldiers"; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, "will eat when they have killed."
He certainly never would have conceived so devilish a one. Adams had, fortunately for himself, fired the right-hand barrel; the concussion had not broken up the plug, for it was still moist, being clay from the trodden-up edge of the pool. It was moist still, for the night dew had found it. The Zappo Zap knew nothing of the plug.
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